ProSource Technologies’ Jeffrey Loeb: Invest in the Long Game

Jeffrey Loeb, senior vice president at Prosource Technologies, has several good philosophies on how to run a successful MSP, but believes that having a long-term strategy is at the heart of everything. Great. Cool. But where to start?

This one pops up a lot, but that just speaks to how utterly important it is to MSP success. One word: culture.

Prosource Technologies’ Jeffrey Loeb

According to Loeb, it all begins here. At the core of everything should be a focus on your employees. If you focus on your employees, your employees will focus on your customers.

“As the owner, you need to constantly work on building and reinforcing your unique culture,” says Loeb. “Create an environment where employees are excited to come to work each day and leave feeling that they made a difference. Delegate and allow employees to make decisions so you can focus on working on the business and not get bogged down.”

Good employees? Good culture. Good culture? All the more wind in the business’ sails. Pretty solid equation, we’d say.

1. Find your focus. You can’t be everything to everyone. The fastest-growing, most profitable MSPs are those that have the narrowest focus.

Determine your ideal client profile. Specialize based on geography, company size, and/or vertical. Become known as an expert in your ideal client profile’s industry. Attend trade shows in that industry, get to know the players and customers, and build a reputation as the MSP to go to for their vertical.

2. Standardize to maximize profit. Standardize your technology stack. Have all customers on the same desktops, servers, firewall, security products and so on. Spend the time up front to make sure every customer is configured to the same standards.

It’s important to keep in mind that your engineers don’t need to be experts in everything, just your product stack. This will minimize support times and pay huge dividends as you grow and scale.

3. Invest in sales and marketing. If you want to grow your business, you as the owner can’t be the only source of new business. This may seem like an obvious one, but it’s an easy trap to fall into. Hire sales people and invest in that magical “M” word — marketing.

It’s a long game and will take awhile to show meaningful results, but be patient. Marketing really is absolutely necessary if you want to have significant growth year over year. There are many sales programs that you can implement — pick one that fits your culture and stick to it.