How It Works
Our process is a client focused strategy to designed to make sure that you are Getting Clients, Closing Clients, Serving Clients, and Keeping Clients.
1.Getting Clients
a. Marketing – How is your Selling, Branding, and Market penetration?
b. Conversion – How well are you at generating leads, and converting them into customers?
2. Closing Clients
a. Offerings – What are you offering, and what problems are you solving?
b. Agreements – What are you charging, how are you formally framing the client relationship? Break Fix, Monthly, Per user, per equipment?
3. Serving Clients
a. Provisioning – How well and fast can you onboard new clients? Do you have Repeatable Processes?
b. Service Delivery – How do you support (on-site, remotely, help desk, projects), How fast can you respond, What tools are you using, Do you document, How many times are you having to solve the same problem over and over again, how fast can you train a new helpdesk person?
4. Keeping Clients involves paying your employees correctly, and incentivizing them the take care of your clients. “Your employees need to feel the way they need to feel to do the things that you need them to do” – Clay Clark
a. Compensation
i. Take care of your employees, they will take care of your clients. What is your compensation model? Base salary plus commision, commision based on key performance indicators?
b. Operations
i. We define operations as getting what your clients need efficiently with the fewest steps or interactions, and promptly exceeding their expectations. This involves organizing your Accounting, Scheduling, Ordering, Provisioning, and Project Management into efficient, documented, and repeatable processes.
ii. Client Touches
1. Staying in front of your clients ensures that relationship ending problems are fixed before they end the relationship.
a. By Weekly Donuts, Cookies, Pastries, etc
b. Monthly “How did last month go” meetings
c. Quarterly reports for Tickets Created, Tickets Resolved, Big Problems Solved, Next Quarter Goals
10 minute meeting
Our 10 minute meeting, (question and answer time not included 🙂 gives us a window into what an owner of a managed services provider is doing and how well they are doing it. We ask 6 questions which follow a What, Where, When, How, Why, and To What Extent. These are the qualifiers that determine how well you doing at running a profitable MSP.
- Evaluation
- Offering – What? (What products and services do you offer)
- Markets – Where? (What do your clients do)
- Business Hours – When? (When are you open, when can your clients contact you)
- Lead Generation – How? (How do you find your clients)
- Problems – Why? (What problems are you solving for your clients)
- Branding – To What Extent is it crap? (Image or Text based, what does it convey)
Once we have the above basic information about your business, we explain a little more about our MSP Owner Coaching Program.
2. MSP Coaching Program
a. Offering –
i. We offer backend support for running a business https://www.thrivetimeshow.com/business-school/ scroll down to What I Can Learn
ii. Expert Experience
1. We have built and grown multiple technology companies
2. We have proven strategies and systems that have allowed us to enjoy gross and net profit margins that are twice the industry average
b. Markets – We focus on MSPs, we operate exclusively with a single IT company in your market and our clients typically see themselves growing into a primary market leader within 12 – 18 months.
c. Business Hours –
i. We make ourselves available to you 8:00 to 8:00 EST, we operate based on 1 hour weekly coaching sessions and advise, as well as hold you accountable, to goals and metrics that we have identified as reachable and winnable for your company. We coach on, Tuesday Wednesday, and Thursday. Monday, we prepare for our weekly coaching sessions.
ii. We limit ourselves to 10 clients per coach at any given time to preserve the quality of time we can spend with each client. In addition to the 1 hour weekly coaching session with the MSP owner , we are available for 30 minute meetings with each of your managing team members, sales, operations, and client relations. This allows for 2.5 hours per week that we are spending with you and your team, providing expert knowledge, advise, and accountability. We recommend scheduling these 30 minute power sessions in advance of a weekly meeting that you are having with your staff as a whole to communicate the company goals for that week, month, and quarter.
d. Lead Generation – We cold call off a Dream 100 list. We look for clients that are not ranking well in their markets, but have either shown evidence that they are trying, or have indicated that they are looking to be a market leader and want to experience business growth, and time freedom.
e. Problems – Service Leadership, which is an industry recognized source for performance statistics, reports that the typical IT service provider reports a Net Profit margin of about 8% with the top 25% of MSPs reporting net margins under 20% We operated our companies with a 40% net and 70% gross profit target and the last tech company we sold was at 39% net and 68% gross the day we sold it. We can typically double your profits by getting rid of labor draining service offerings, improving the types of products you are offering, and improving your service delivery, marketing, and branding, closing, etc
f. Close – Sign the client up for an 18 month program.
i. So from what I have heard, I feel that you would be a great fit for our program. What I would like to do is schedule you for what we call our Deep Dive. THis is where we go over key performance indicators for your company. Together, we grade your business in each particular area. We then use this information to create an agenda which will outline the proven path to a becoming a successful Managed Services Provider in your area.
ii. When do you think you would be available to schedule our Deep Dive? This is typically a 1 – 2 hour conference call with you, or a couple members of your team that represent Sales, Operations, and Client Relations. We go over your Getting Clients, and Closing Clients, then Serving Clients, and Keeping Clients.
iii. Schedule the Deep Dive and allow 1 – 2 hours for this meeting.
Contact us to schedule a 10 minute conversation with one of our founders to see how you too can find time and financial freedom.
