Category: Better Business
Mike J Douglass: Find your MSP niche and take your business to the next level
A lot of managed service providers and IT suppliers look the same — they’re all vanilla. Ten years ago, this was fine because you were still in high demand for your IT skills and knowledge. Now with advancements in technology, automation,...
Gary Pica: 3 best practice strategies for MSP pricing models
Determining your managed service provider pricing can feel like “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Charge too much, and you’re unable to stay competitive. Charge too little, and you undercut your business, leaving you without the revenue you...
Channel Chat: How joining a peer group can help you find MSP success
Owning an MSP can be lonely. Most of the people you talk to on a regular basis, whether they’re your spouse, your friends, or even other local business owners that you know, don’t understand what it’s like to run an...
Relationship between internal IT teams and MSPs evolves rapidly
A survey of 1,000 senior IT leaders conducted by TEKsystems finds that more than a third (35 percent) plan to increase spending on IT outsourcing in 2018, a six-point increase over 2017. Nearly half (47 percent) also reported that spending on...
Co-seller models find increased appeal in the age of the cloud
The way IT vendors have historically sold products and services has revolved primarily around models where a channel partner either resold the product after acquiring it from the vendor or acted as an agent on behalf of the vendor. But,...
Mike J Douglass: How to improve your productivity while running a busy MSP
A lot of MSPs start out the same — launched by techies that want to create a service offering they can control and develop. This often means the MSP owner is spending most of their time working IN the business and...
Stop doing these 7 manual network management tasks
Active network infrastructure management is a key element of any managed service offering. Traditionally, network management has involved a lot of tedious manual work, making it expensive and very hard to scale. And that’s why many MSPs have shied away...
Awareness of GDPR rights builds slowly in the EU
The first major issue many IT organizations will confront in the new year is the need to comply with the General Data Protection Rule (GDPR) that goes into effect in the European Union (EU) in 142 days. Scheduled to go into...
Spiceworks report finds IT labor costs likely to rise in 2018
The single biggest expense when it comes to managing IT is IT labor costs. So, when the salaries of IT professionals start to increase it has positive and negative implications for managed service providers. A 2018 IT Career Outlook survey...
Why MSPs need to create a business plan template to achieve success
Over the past five years I have coached more than 1,000 MSPs on how to increase recurring revenue and profitability. In every case, the business owner wanted their future results to be dramatically different than their current situation. This means...
