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

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

Following on from my last blog, here are 10 more golden nuggets on building a sustainable MSP.

1. Dashboards - only have dashboards that promote meaningful KPIs - separate as much noise as possible, including all automation ticket info. Never display the total number of open tickets on a team's public dashboard. This can be demoralising.
2. Define your company WHY - "success through technology" - throughout our organisation we aspire to help our clients achieve world class in their own sectors by using technology as the key driver. We build partnerships and trust through providing quality support, proactive account management, sound up-to-date technical advice and a strategy that will enable continued improvement through good use of technology. This gives our client the platform to be able to deliver a world-class service in their own sector - size should not be important.
3. Reward your people and have a solid gamification strategy in place that ties directly to your company values and departmental objectives.
4. Corporate social responsibility - use this positively and get your team to contribute in a big way. It builds on the culture and encourages active individual and team participation.
5. Introduce annual surveys for your end users and their suits. It is important to know what they think about your overall service. CSATs are important but only one of many KPIs for measuring your customer experience.
6. Industry events - attend as many appropriate industry events or user groups of your chosen tool set provider - you are always learning, and this is where it happens - all levels of the business should have the opportunity to be involved. Use trips as a reward for commitment.
7. CSATs are a must and should tie into your employee engagement piece. if your CSAT tool doesn't to this, replace it with one that does.
8. Monitor burnout of your frontline guys. If you do not monitor and the team are over-utilised, burnout will occur at around 12 months. Low turnover of staff is critical; without it you will never grow. Stability of people and using them to build your client knowledge is the foundation for the road to service desk heaven.
9. Create a company strategic audit - a four-year plan of where you want to go. Then monitor weekly via automation and discuss at your management meeting monthly.
10. Don't expect your service desk manager to be able to drive strategy and operations. Invest in a delivery management team structure as soon as you can.