It can be challenging to grow your MSP business with the current MSP hiring challenges that are happening worldwide. The current tight labor market has made MSP hiring challenges more difficult than ever to find the right technical team members to grow your MSP business. If your team is already stretched thin, this can limit your ability to add new clients and slow your growth.
Add to that the challenge that more than ever, people are continuing to work from home. This has caused clients to increase their demand for technology to help their employees achieve their daily tasks. Also, the tech talent pool is shallower than ever, with more companies vying for a limited number of technicians. This increased demand drives up salaries and makes it really challenging for MSPs to attract and retain top talent.
If you are trying to increase your recurring revenue and clients are placing more demand on your technicians, it can be difficult to grow. Expanding your business may feel impossible, but there are a number of ways to remedy the situation. This process can be time-consuming and difficult, so where do you start?
We want to share with you some of the things we did that helped to make us a 7 figure MSP:
Manage clients’ expectations.
Just like you take a proactive approach to IT management, do the same when considering your situation. Set boundaries and reasonable standards that you can meet. Setting boundaries involves defining the scope of your services and what clients can realistically expect. You need to communicate these boundaries with your clients. Be clear about response times, service levels, and project timelines. When clients have a clear understanding of what you can provide, it helps avoid unrealistic demands and disappointment down the road. We found that by taking a proactive approach to managing client expectations, we built trust with our clients which then created a more positive and cooperative working relationship. This highly contributed to our success and growth as an MSP.
Look at restructuring your current tech team.
Evaluate whether your most talented technicians are having to deal with lower value or repetitive tasks that hinder their ability to focus on more valuable tasks.
When we were an MSP, we would periodically evaluate tasks that our technicians would perform and identify them as higher-value, lower-value or routine. Lower-value or routine tasks often include things like basic troubleshooting, routine maintenance, or administrative duties. Once you’ve pinpointed these areas, assign less-experienced technicians to handle the lower-value tasks, freeing up your experienced technicians to focus on higher value tasks and strategic planning. We even found tasks that our less-experienced technicians were focusing on that we were able to hire lower cost administrative staff to handle.
We found that by restructuring our tech team in this manner allowed us to enhance our customer satisfaction. Clients benefitted from having more seasoned technicians to focus on complex challenges, resulting in faster problem resolution and a higher level of service quality. This highly contributed to our growth and success as an MSP.
“Pumpkin plan” your clients.
Have you ever read the book “The Pumpkin Plan” by Michael Michalowicz? If you haven’t, I suggest you do. The central idea behind the book is to nurture and prioritize your best clients while carefully pruning those that take up more time than they are worth.
When we were an MSP, it was obvious that not all clients were created equal. Some clients were like thriving pumpkins, offering substantial value, steady growth and a great working relationship. Others drained our teams time and energy, even going to the point of lowering the overall morale of our team.
When we read “The Pumpkin Plan” and were privileged to meet Michael and talk to him, we quickly embraced the principles of his book and would periodically evaluate our client base and fire those clients that did not align with our long-term goals and values. It was not easy to do at first, but it allowed us to more closely nurture our clients that contributed most significantly to our success. This allowed us to increase our MRR and grow substantially.
Select Vendors that can help.
There’s no easy way to resolve tech talent shortages, but the answer isn’t always to hire more IT employees. Think outside the box. Explore strategic partnerships with vendors that possess a deep understanding of your specific challenges and have a proven track record of helping MSPs overcome them. For example, if you want to offer cloud services, maybe you need help with cloud migration or are lacking the knowledge to understand how to deploy a specific client environment in the cloud. An experienced CSP, like Cloud Services For MSPs, can fill these service gaps for you without adding new staff.
Adopt automated technology tools.
If you are not using technology tools in your MSP to efficiently manage processes like device management, managing contracts, proactive monitoring and issue resolution, you are missing out. Technology tools like these can truly make your life easier and can help alleviate the strain on a limited workforce. When we were and MSP we utilized several technology tools that helped us to become more efficient and allowed us to automate tasks that our technicians were having to perform manually. This allowed our technicians to concentrate on higher value tasks that could not be automated.
MSP Hiring challenges are sure to persist moving into the future. Continuing to grow when your technicians are already stretched thin and current customers are placing more demands on your services is vital to the longevity of your MSP, so make sure you are making the right tweaks to your MSP to continue succeeding.
If you would like more help in growing your MSP, please consider joining our free Cloud Academy that we created to share with you all the knowledge that made us a 7 figure MSP. Simply click on the join cloud academy button at the top of this page.