If I Were Launching an MSP Now | Nicholas Boris

Nicholas Boris, founder and president of Pittsburgh-based SNAP Forward, shares three suggestions he'd apply if he were launching an MSP from scratch today.

1. Focus on the customer experience Customer experience is incredibly high on my priority list right now. What I mean by that is trying to reduce the friction between a customer contacting us for whatever their needs might be. Whether it's a desk worker contacting our help desk, what stops them from calling? Do they perceive any sort of friction between us and them? How do we best get to resolving their problem as quickly as possible? We look at things from response time; to the number of contacts or the number of touches it takes for a customer to talk to us to get their problem resolved; to how quickly we can move a business owner down the line of making the proper (strategic) decision for their business.

2. Know your business – I break it down into five areas: think, plan, hustle, learn, and repeat. From the "think" aspect, I'm constantly thinking "why us?" Why is somebody going to come to us over the competition? What makes us different? What is that one thing that makes us stand out and is going attract them to SNAP Forward? "Plan"—what are our promises and how are we going to deliver them properly. From "hustle"—and this is probably one of the biggest things—plan to outwork the competition. I think when I first started my business, I thought I was going to work eight, maybe ten hours a day, and in reality it turned out to be fourteen or more. And a lot of weekends. From the "learning" aspect—it's reading. I read about business in general constantly. It's not so much technical learning. It's almost a detriment to be a good technician, because it makes it hard to hire people. But learning about business in general, to properly strategize and position yourself in the marketplace. I'm always trying to learn from my mistakes. We discuss what happened in the previous week, the feedback we received from customers, positive or negative, to try to figure out what we can change to make it better. We have a process where if we can identify an end user that we haven't talked to in a certain amount of time, we proactively contact that end user and find out why. Did they not believe that we could help them or are there really no problems? Or are they just not familiar enough with us to make the call?

3. Hire the right people – Do all the work to properly strategize and put down on paper who you want to be. Especially us, being a small company, if we whiff on one employee, it can set us back months. A lot of people are technically proficient and we hire smart people as does everybody else. But it's about hiring for the culture. (We're) preaching positivity and taking care of customers and ensuring their customer experiences are top notch. I can't hire somebody that's disorganized, negative and doesn't place a priority on effectively communicating with somebody and finding out what their problem is and properly understanding the needs of a client. While I can train people how to go about our process and deliver our services, I need to have the right mental mindset, the right attitude and culture fit when we're picking somebody to come along with us for the ride.

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