11 Innovative Ways to Add Operational Efficiency
Signing new business isn't the only way to take home more cash.
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“The two biggest changes eGroup made over the course of 2017 were to a) focus our portfolio on recurring-revenue plays, and b) modify our sales plans to emphasize those key plays. The results were tremendous — topline revenues were maintained and converted into subscription-based solutions and services, while our bottom-line grew by 200 percent.”
— Mike Carter, CEO
“Expedient continued to implement automation throughout its business in 2018, [in areas like] service delivery, [where] common configuration tasks for many solutions are scripted and orchestrated to limit manual efforts, improve accuracy, and speed the process of service activation. [We also applied automation in] support. [Now] common administrative tasks such as software installation, operating-system patching, and appliance upgrades are standardized and executed on a schedule.
“These activities enable our business to scale in ways that allow us to maintain the best possible customer experience and accommodate increasingly complex customer requirements. In particular, automation of high-volume tasks has consistently enabled us to manage our hiring requirements. Automation of repetitive tasks eventually enables more capacity with the same team members to handle new, or more complex work.”
— Jonathan H. Rosenson, Senior Vice President, Strategic Initiatives, Expedient
“[We] instituted a new deployment methodology for on-boarding and introducing new clients’ business … We created a dedicated team to work hand-in-hand with new clients to gather all necessary documentation, deploy our management agents, and liaise with our internal teams so that we have a smooth transition.
“This process has streamlined our new client on-boardings, making them more efficient for our company and providing clients with a positive experience. We have been so successful with this change, that I often get incredible feedback from our clients.”
— Karyn Schell, President, DP Solutions
“We decided to focus more on selling additional cloud solutions to our existing clients. Many of our clients were already on Microsoft Office 365 for email, but they were not aware that we could host everything on a virtual desktop and eliminate their need for servers on site. Once we were able to help our clients transition to a managed-services plan that also included a virtual desktop in our bundle, we were able to add more value, which enabled us to charge more for our services without having to hire level 3 staff. We have also been more focused on helping our clients solve business problems and educate them about cybersecurity, and we can do this with fewer technical resources, which also helps us be more profitable.”
— Chris Noles, President, Beyond Computer Solutions
“The single biggest change we made in 2017 was the adoption of STRATOP via HTG [Peer Groups]. Materially laying out all areas of the business, creating plans for fixing the pain points, identifying what items would drive us forward, and creating the team that would be accountable for implementing these processes was instrumental to our growth this year. We’re cooking at a 15 percent EBIDA for the most recent four quarters, while passing by 25 percent the most recent quarter, so the proof is in the profit. Not only is this our best year, but profit has been ticking up alongside revenue quarter-over-quarter — so we’re growing profitably.
“Truly getting down a leadership cadence, having structured, effective meetings, and [implementing] a common “language” among the team to drive items forward has been instrumental for Doberman throughout 2018.
“I don’t think this is a unique item to STRATOP; it’s just vital MSPs get a planning process in place, whether it’s STRATOP, EOS, or something different, you have to have a plan to get to where you want to go.”
— Ian Richardson, CEO/Founder, Doberman Technologies
“[We implemented] a real-time dashboard in 2018 — one focused on key performance indicators tied to operational measures from our incident management system. [It] quickly enabled our support engineers to better visualize issues and requests and to more actively engage with customers based on that deeper understanding. This has also led to increased opportunities to monetize customer requests for managed services not contained within the customer’s current scope of services. In fact, we found that 60 percent of tickets were identified as requests or potential up-sell opportunities outside of that current scope. The real-time dashboard implementation has also given us a stronger ability to focus on customer engagement and retention, both through our engineering and customer success staff.”
— Keith Archer, COO, Mission
“The largest impact in 2017 was transitioning to the user-based pricing model and bundling additional value-added services to support an increased seat price. This allowed us to pick up more residual revenue from cloud services and provide a higher value to our clients. Being able to command a higher seat price increased our top line revenue as well as our profit.”
— Phillip Poarch, Vice President, Tolar Systems
“[Our] biggest change was to migrate our service team to more role-based, over skill-based or technology-based positions. Revenues are about the same, but profitability is increased over 50 percent. People are designated to our service desk, professional services and other roles so the same people are always taking calls and creating tickets instead of rotating or people helping out.”
—Steve “The Doctor” Meek, CISSP, President, Fulcrum Group
“Thrive implemented a company-wide initiative in early 2018 to break out our service-delivery engineers into “pods,” who then support a defined number of customers, often populated within a singular vertical. (financial services, life sciences, health care, etc.) These pods contain Level I, Level II engineers, as well as senior subject matter experts (SMEs). We also assigned technical account managers alongside these pods in order to help coordinate client activities and future technology road-mapping to better serve customers. As a result, client satisfaction has risen rapidly, and the encapsulated account knowledge that these smaller teams have gained has translated into superior efficiencies, better response times and higher first-call resolution for our clients.”
—Rob Stephenson, CEO, Thrive Networks
“Introducing additional services to our MSP contracts is the single biggest profit-increasing change we made this year. By adding centralized services that increased automation and decreased touch time for each customer, we decreased the average time-per-customer interaction while increasing profitability. We’ve been able to decrease our time-per-ticket as well; with the additional information collected on every incident, we diagnose and remediate issues quickly and give our customers better support.”
— Mark Holdsworth Jr., Solutions Manager, Managed Services, Accudata Systems
“Among the biggest changes in 2017 – and there were a lot – was integrating Power BI with our ConnectWise instance to create real-time reporting. By quantifying our efforts across departments and through customer acquisition, we were able to track, for example, our marketing spend by campaign to see in real dollars what it cost us to acquire a new customer. Power BI also created more transparency during our partner-focused events. With our Microsoft Azure workshops, we were able to track the progress from first contact with a client, to the scheduled meeting, to submitting the statement of work to Microsoft for review. Our various team members, instead of having to dig through ConnectWise looking for the information they needed, could easily view data on monitors we have mounted throughout our offices. Overall, Power BI and real-time reporting has allowed us to make faster, more well-informed decisions about our business.”
— James Hwang, COO, NexusTek
“Among the biggest changes in 2017 – and there were a lot – was integrating Power BI with our ConnectWise instance to create real-time reporting. By quantifying our efforts across departments and through customer acquisition, we were able to track, for example, our marketing spend by campaign to see in real dollars what it cost us to acquire a new customer. Power BI also created more transparency during our partner-focused events. With our Microsoft Azure workshops, we were able to track the progress from first contact with a client, to the scheduled meeting, to submitting the statement of work to Microsoft for review. Our various team members, instead of having to dig through ConnectWise looking for the information they needed, could easily view data on monitors we have mounted throughout our offices. Overall, Power BI and real-time reporting has allowed us to make faster, more well-informed decisions about our business.”
— James Hwang, COO, NexusTek
One of the recurring themes of 2018 has been how to stop hemorrhaging profit in order to increase the bottom line. In other words, how do managed service providers (MSPs) become more proficient so that the revenue they bring in isn’t wasted by inefficiencies in operations?
It isn’t just Channel Futures that’s been harping on the subject. Operational efficiency has been the subject of breakout sessions and talked about in keynote speeches in the conference circuit throughout 2018. Carolyn April, senior director of industry analyst at CompTIA, has spoken often about strategies to do more with less, including the usual culprits: implement a professional services automation (PSA) solution; automate back-office processes through an enterprise resource processing (ERP) system; and stand over your techs with a whip. (We’re joking; please don’t do this.)
CompTIA’s Carolyn April
April also tells us it’s imperative to reward staff members for their efforts. Without staff buy-in, she advises, your efforts to streamline have a high likelihood of failure. The key is to create incentives to boost productivity and encourage them to constantly be thinking of ways to more efficiently complete tasks.
Throughout the fourth quarter of 2018, as part of our “In Focus” series, we are featuring a series of galleries designed to help partners grow their businesses in 2019 and beyond. |
“Two-thirds of channel firms in CompTIA’s research study on operational efficiency are doing just that, having created annual goals that incent their employees to be more productive,” says April. “Another 37 percent have hired a formal project manager to take the broad view of how the organization is meeting these goals.”
But if you don’t feel like throwing money at your staff to incentivize them, take a tip from one of these 11 channel partners that have been thinking outside the box. Through experimentation, some MSPs have landed on creative formulas to create operational efficiencies that have served them very, very well this year.
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