My top 50 tips for building a sustainable MSP: part one

Air-IT founder Todd McQuilkin imparts the first 10 of his golden nuggets for MSP owners

My first blog post will cover ten golden nuggets for building a sustainable TSP/MSP. These nuggets are taken directly from my experiences and are not from a text book or cloned from my peers. A lot are nothing new but hopefully a good few will be light bulb moments for you.

I am no academic and I come from the school of hard knocks. I don't proclaim to have owned and then sold a successful MSP. I have built with £20,000 in my pocket a sustainable technology business that we use as a lab to authenticate our work.

Today, Air-IT sits at over £350,000 a month on recurring revenue - that's around 60 per cent of our TO - and we continue to grow at between £5,000 and £10,000 a month.

We have over 400 clients with a retention rate of 95 per cent. Our headcount is at 57 and our retention is 95 per cent (industry average is 86.9 per cent) and our employee engagement is 78 per cent (UK average is 45 per cent - shocking, I know). Over the years our company has won a whole host of awards both locally and nationally. But by far the most prestigious achievement to date has be the Service Desk Institute 3-star certification our service desk achieved in July 2017.

For me, besides continuing to work with the directors to drive the Air-IT strategy, I work in our consultancy practice Air-MSP with my son Daniel and Simon Smith. As a team we help aspiring tech companies become true ICT MSPs and work with them to achieve TPSA - Total Professional Services Automation. It's a real passion of ours. To date we have had the privilege of working with over 50 TSP/MSPs in UK and Ireland.

Here are (in no particular order), the first 10 of my 50 gold nuggets:

1. The Customer Experience - Develop a CX programme and put it at the forefront of everything you do. You must get out of the mindset that profits are No. 1 and start to realise that the CX is No. 1 and with a great CX comes good profits. This is the most important measures if you are to build a sustainable business that has the foundations to scale and to be able to cope with any future high growth spurts.
2. Honesty - Be honest with yourself and your team. Continued service improvement and working towards a world-class standard can only be achieved through honest assessment of yourself, your team and the BI you have - use wisely and honestly
3. Tool set - Your tool set needs to be defined at your earliest opportunity. Don't think you can use your own developed ticketing engine or your own spreadsheets to monitor progress - invest in PSA or ITSM software from the offset
4. Super charge your PSA or ITSM - Look to use complementary integrators at the appropriate time
5. Marketing spend is tangible - Measure your return on investment by utilising your CRM in your PSA to its full potential. Making sure you get to the bottom of where the lead came from. Hearing "I found you on the internet" is not good enough. They may have seen you at the football, the cricket or on a local junior football team shirt then searched for you on the net. Ask questions and be accurate with the data input into your PSA. The whole life cycle can then be followed through then presented in a reporting tool like Bright Gauge. You will soon work out what the ROI is from your marketing campaigns.
6. Employee engagement - Invest in an employee engagement piece. This must be looked at in depth and the system needs to fall in line with your departmental and company objectives
7. Knowledge management from the offset - Look at KCS methodology and create the process to have good knowledge management in place. Knowledge that will be used by your techies and your customers for self-help
8. The right people on the right seats - An obvious one but far too often we employ the wrong fit as we are under pressure and we don't end up selecting based on the culture of the business.
9. Culture - This must be engrained into your business not just writing on the walls. Get this right from the start and employ based around your values and culture.
10. Experience - Get an experienced service desk manager in place and work with them to build your service offering. Do not expect a long-serving techie to be able to do the job because they know the business. Service delivery is a dark art, process and systems have to be defined and best practice must be followed. Techies are generally not good at leading change programmes.

I'll be back with my next ten golden nuggets soon.

Todd McQuilkin is CEO of Nottingham-based MSP Air-IT