Accelerate Business Change Through Peer Engagement

The theme of this year’s Fall MSP Summit is "The New Era in Managed Services" as partners embrace business models, practices, technology stacks and tools that take them to higher levels of margins. Many MSPs are feeling margin pressure due to the commodization of services, especially in the areas of security and cloud. It seems cyber and cloud were the havens many MSPs migrated to over the past few years in search of richer margins by offering higher value services to their customers. 

That is why nearly 1,300 IT professionals focused on the business of managed services have descended on Atlanta to attend the MSP Summit, which is jammed with content to help MSPs hone their business models whether they are looking for ways to grow revenue, add new technology or build out new practice areas. Speakers here will tackle the big issues in a vendor-neutral setting that allows everyone to talk freely about the challenges they have with specific vendors or platform providers. While a star-studded group of CEOs from Kaseya, NinjaOne and Sophos will discuss the outlook for their companies and platforms, the real stars of the event are the leaders of the managed services companies. 

If partners are going to embrace this new era, they need to hear from the C-suite of their peer set. Peer-to-peer content and interaction is at the core of the MSP Summit, a phenomenon driven by interest in companies that qualified for the MSP 501 list. It's no wonder given the qualifying process to make the MSP 501. The financial results of these companies set them apart from all others because their businesses are built on strong recurring revenue streams, high growth rates and high productivity based on their employee-to-sales ratio. So, everyone wants to learn the secret sauce of these companies. 

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It's akin to burger companies that tried to figure out the secret of the McDonald’s Big Mac or the formula of Coca-Cola. Let’s face it, both are replicated pretty closely, but it is the execution of those businesses that matters most. Such is the case when it comes to companies like SourcePass or Triton Networks or Meriplex. Industry luminaries like Marcial Velez of Xperteks are often more than willing to share their business practices because that investment in transparency is usually paid back several times over by peers who will share their insights. 

But this was not always the case. It was not so long ago that many leaders of so-called solution providers or IT firms whose major revenue source were hardware were reluctant to share much about their businesses. The reason was simple: Their only differentiator was price or the bargaining power they had with major hardware suppliers. We all know the story of what happened to those organizations in terms of industry influence and consolidation. 

So what the MSP Summit represents is a community willing to share to lift its collective value to new heights. The old cliché about a rising tide lifting all boats is on display among this group of invested executives. They are perhaps part of one of the largest, private clubs in the world with a simple motive— let’s deliver better services to the customer and do so more profitability. That allows these companies to better serve their customers every day. 

Another great example of companies willing to invest in their peer set is that of New Charter Technologies, which conducts on site training from a methodology playbook it calls Front Runner. During in depth workshops conducted by the leaders of New Charter, MSPs can refine their business models, optimize sales and align business strategies to customer needs. It is knowledge sharing you can't find anywhere else because it comes from leaders who apply those same principles every day.