This article will help introduce you to what an MSP (Managed Service Provider) is, why they matter, and (if you run one) how to introduce what you do to your prospect so they can understand the value of your offering.
MSP stands for Managed Service Provider which is an outsourced IT solution for businesses or individuals. This isn’t necessarily traditional “outsourcing” (with the associated negative connotation) and there’s a good bit of nuance to exactly how the business relationship works between an MSP and their client. Different MSPs have different ways of doing things, and that may or may not be compatible with your business or needs. If you run an MSP or work for one, you already know this, but how do you explain it to clients in a way that shows what you do and what the added value is? For businesses, how do you know what to look for when choosing an IT professional to augment your technical abilities.
Let’s go over what MSPs do, what makes them operate at the costs they do, why this matters to your business or your prospects, and how to choose an MSP.
What an MSP Does
While the term can define other types of businesses, it has largely grown to specify outsourced IT services. MSPs help clients scale their businesses by offloading the difficult tasks of building, maintaining, scaling, and supporting various IT services. They augment existing technical staff or even wholesale replace them depending on the nature of the business they’re supporting and its requirements.
Each MSP does things differently and what one does (or doesn’t do) can determine their feasibility as a primary technical provider for a given business. These arrangements can even include things such as equipment support (e.g. replacing equipment as part of their agreement), helping a business find the right SaaS or on-premise solution for their needs, etc. Some will have staff stationed at a client’s office. This has the effect of making the monthly cost higher, but without unexpected costs. Your monthly TCO (total cost of ownership) goes up on average, but is smoothed out to something consistent and easy to plan around (and can even go down overall with the right setup).
MSPs manage assets remotely using an RMM tool (Remote Monitoring and Management). This allows forms of automation and control which are difficult for smaller businesses to get access to on their own. Setup correctly, it can also function as a canary and provide proactive protection. Monitored alerts are the difference between an important file system going down and catching a drive before it goes bad.
Most MSPs will offer whatever is necessary for a business’ technical success (if they are able to). The business model works by the power of scale and by doing “one thing” (IT) and doing it well. Your success is their success whether you’re a business looking to use an MSP or an MSP looking at clients. The client worries about their business, the MSP worries about their IT.
How MSPs Work
It’s expensive to staff and maintain an IT department and exact costs are hard to predict. By outsourcing IT, a business can save money on staffing costs, get access to a greater depth of IT knowledge (for similar or even less than hiring a single employee), have a scalable IT department without the full cost (e.g. 24/7 staffing), and have more predictability for their billing (e.g. normalized cost for support). MSPs leverage the fact they support multiple clients to pool resources. Think of it as paid access to a technical co-op or similar rather than traditional outsourcing.
Most MSPs will leverage a PSA tool (Professional Service Automation) to track clients and their agreements. Different MSP agreements will also have different SLAs (Service Level Agreement) for the response time to a given issue (this doesn’t mean time to resolution in most agreements, just the time to begin work). This allows the MSP to better balance resources based on whether you have a minor issue or a major issue. A site down is usually going to have a tighter SLA than a trivial printer warning. Think of it as an IT ER protocol.
Capable MSPs tend to have more experience with IT than many businesses and more access to more efficient technical solutions (e.g. more competitive prices due to scale). If you’re a business, you typically work within your specific needs, but most MSPs have experience with many different scenarios and use cases. As your business grows, this specific experience can come in handy. Small businesses growing into larger businesses often struggle with the technical challenges of scaling their infrastructure and choosing solutions. Having someone who has seen the specific pitfalls of a given solution or knows the right answer can save you time, effort, and expenses, both short-term and long-term.
Why This Matters for Businesses
The right MSP can allow you room to grow without expending considerably more for IT costs. You don’t have to worry about the cost of staffing a 24/7 support desk, you just need to worry about the number of agents or scope of support. As you grow, you’ll need more employees, but a single employee has a certain, limited amount of work they can do and you can’t just reasonably schedule around what your business needs at their expense. But, an MSP allows exactly this with better resource allocation.
An MSP reduces the costs of hiring and training. They can also reduce the costs of migrating to new solutions (with the right contract). Most modern MSPs work off of a fixed cost per agent, user, or similar rather than traditional break-fix agreements. This means that if you have an hour of work or a hundred hours of work (that falls under contract), the rate is the same. A good MSP prefers this arrangement because it means once they get their client setup, they will have virtually no work for a fixed cost until something needs to change or something unexpectedly breaks (no matter how proactive, computers still break).
Even if you still want your own IT staff, an MSP can help offload work that is painful to manage. If you have 24/7 needs, an MSP can be used to offload the help desk functions so that your staff can focus on what is necessary for your business. If work has variable loads, an MSP agreement can allow temporary staffing or augmentation of your environment with a contract to protect both of your interests. No two MSPs are going to offer the exact same agreements so you need to shop around for what works for your specific needs.
How to Choose an MSP
Choosing an MSP is like choosing any other vendor: some are better than others. That being said, what makes any competently run and managed business “better” is going to depend on exactly what you need. You need to know what you do, why you do it, what you’re looking to do, and how you plan to accomplish it to get the right MSP for your needs.
What is the SLA of a prospective MSP and is it acceptable for your business? What does their contract allow them to do and where does it clash with your needs? What are they good at and does it work with your needs? Why are you outsourcing your IT and infrastructure in the first place? If you don’t understand what you’re getting into, you have a good chance of seeing a loss from the relationship. IT can be murky, but a good MSP will explain what they do, why it matters to you, and have the contracts to back it up for both of you. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and if your IT is lacking, it takes time to make everything work.
MSPs should also shop their prospects so they avoid getting in over their head (unless they have the ability to deliver). If your business specializes in traditional onsite work, why would you take a cloud-only customer unless you’re actively working to expand? The wrong client is more detrimental than skipping a bad prospect thanks to the legal headaches and contractual obligations.
Ultimately, the relationship between an MSP and their client is bidirectional. You need them as much as they need you (whichever side of the discussion you’re on). Make sure you understand what you’re getting into before you find out things aren’t going to work and you’re both stuck.
What You Need to Know About Microsoft’s O365 and M365 Price Increases
After a decade of unchanged prices (aside from newly introduced services), Microsoft is raising prices for enterprise Office 365 licenses. These changes will take effect on March 1 of 2022. There are no (immediate) plans to raise the cost of either educational or commercial suites.
Here’s what the price changes look like:
Microsoft 365 Business Basic: increasing from $5 to $6 per license (20% increase)
Microsoft 365 Business Premium: increasing from $20 to $22 per license (10% increase)
Office 365 E1: increasing from $8 to $10 per license (25% increase)
Office 365 E3: increasing from $20 to $23 per license (15% increase)
Office 365 E5: increasing from $35 to $38 per license (~8.6% increase)
Microsoft 365 E3: increasing from $32 to $36 per license (12.5% increase)
While the individual prices aren’t a huge increase, the percentage increase ranges from around 8.6% (O365 E5) to 25% (O365 E1). This change overwhelmingly impacts the lower tier licenses and will be a major increase for smaller clients.
The one silver lining is that Microsoft has announced that: [W]e are announcing that we will add unlimited dial-in capabilities for Microsoft Teams meetings across our enterprise, business, frontline, and government suites over the next few months. The standard audio conferencing license is $4 a month, so this does work out to a bit of a discount for certain use cases.
With Office 365 E5 getting a hike, it’s safe to assume that other products will be getting a hike down the line. It might not happen anytime soon, but it seems to be in line with how Microsoft tends to raise prices. Keep in mind, this is all speculation and not rooted in any specific announcement or other information aside from trends with Microsoft. Don’t sound the alarm quite yet, but it is something to keep an eye on down the line.
Robust Documentation Practices Feed a Process-Focused Approach to MSP Growth
We’ve talked about how documentation — good documentation — can help your techs do their jobs more efficiently and with less stress. We’ve talked about the power of documentation to eliminate those small inefficiencies which, over time, can erode your business’s bottom line. Now it’s time to cut down to the very core of the matter.
In this blog post, we’re going to look at the relationship between IT documentation and process. As the following should make clear, robust documentation practices help businesses run more efficiently and profitably by improving process.
What is Process?
In business, your process is … everything. OK, that might be overstating things just a little, but if we define a “process” as “the way something gets done,” then it’s not a stretch to say that businesses — when you strip away all of the superficial elements — are just people engaged in various processes.
Now, depending on how organized and efficient your business is, these processes can range from largely improvisational to highly systematic, and from vague to crystal clear. But whatever the case, your IT company’s “process” is the totality of all the individual processes by which you and your employees carry out your duties. Simply put, your process is how your business gets things done.
So, let’s take an in-depth look at the relationship between IT documentation and process. The more you know about this topic, the more effectively you can harness documentation to help you achieve YOUR business goals.
Process Makes Perfect
Deciding to get serious about documentation is one of the single most powerful business decisions you can make. This is because a commitment to documentation is a commitment to process, and a commitment to process is, perhaps more than anything else, what distinguishes successful and profitable IT businesses from the plethora of companies fighting for survival.
Being committed to your process isn’t the same thing as being committed to your business. This is important to keep in mind. Being committed to your business means that you really want to see it succeed, and work hard — really hard — to bring about that success. Most business owners are committed to their respective businesses. Being committed to your process means that you want to see your business succeed, but also, that you’re willing to spend time and energy on figuring out HOW BEST TO DO THAT. A true commitment to process is relatively rare in the business world.
Here’s an analogy. If you want to make the NBA, it’s a good idea to practice basketball — and practice A LOT. But an even better idea is practicing a lot AND taking time to step back, identify weak points in your game, and tailor a training program to bring your weak points up to speed.
Documentation forces you to step back in this manner and think about how your business ‘practices’ — i.e., how it gets things done. When you write down the processes by which your business runs, you’re FAR more likely to apply critical thinking to make these processes better, more efficient, etc. In short, documentation provides a direct impetus for working on how you work.
Practice may make perfect, but only when it’s bolstered by an awareness of process. Are you using documentation not only as a way of recording core business processes, but as a tool for refining these processes for maximal productivity and efficiency?
Go with the Flow
We just discussed how documentation facilitates process refinement and optimization — by writing down your IT company’s core business processes, you’re forced to take a good, hard look at those processes, and consider whether and in what ways they could be improved.
When it comes to process refinement, one thing you should be looking to do is maximize flow. A process that flows is one that unfolds smoothly and efficiently. And when your processes flow, so too do your workers.
“Flow state” (so dubbed by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) is a recognized and widely studied psychological phenomenon. It refers to a mental state people sometimes enter when they’re doing something they enjoy, are good at, and find challenging but not too challenging (i.e., not overwhelming). You can think of being in the flow state as being “in the zone” — you’re immersed in a goal-directed activity, everything’s clicking, and you experience a pleasurable feeling of total focus and clarity.
Documenting your core business processes breaks tasks down into a series of discrete steps. The benefit of generating a specific sequence of steps cannot be overstated vis-à-vis the pursuit of flow. This is because a key feature of the flow state is, as Csikszentmihalyi remarked in a 2004 TED Talk, knowing “exactly what you want to do from one moment to the other.” When you’re in the flow state, “every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one.”
If your business has clear, stepwise processes for your techs to follow — which it will, if your documentation is up to snuff — your techs will be able to enter the flow state more easily and more often; under most circumstances, they’ll know what to do and when to do it. This is good for business; studies have linked the flow state to productivity, motivation, and company loyalty.
Step it Up
We just talked about how documentation creates clear-cut, stepwise processes that make it easier for your technicians to get in the zone. Let’s discuss the importance of steps some more.
Breaking down a task into a series of discrete steps is a powerful tool for augmenting productivity. In our previous blog post on documentation, we saw how the accumulation of small inefficiencies at your business can really hurt your bottom line. One such ‘small inefficiency’ is the simple act of pausing and asking yourself, ‘OK, what am I supposed to do next?’ People without morning routines know how much time this single thought can gobble up. And people with morning routines know the pleasure of being able to move seamlessly from one thing to the next.
But you want your techs engaged. You don’t want them to go through the motions, mindlessly following steps that have been laid out for them. You want them thinking for themselves … right?
First, if your documentation gets so good that your techs are having too easy a time, barely needing to think, feel free to send us a detailed description of your documentation protocols — because that sounds like a good problem to have!
Second, that’s not going to happen. Providing IT support is always going to be unpredictable, challenging, and at times, stressful.
Your techs are like chefs, in that they receive tickets (orders) from paying customers who expect swift and competent service (a good meal). Without ‘recipes’ (clear-cut, written-down processes to follow), your techs have to spend time and cognitive resources figuring out what to do and when to do it. But when your techs have ‘recipes,’ they don’t have to think about what to do when, and thus, can focus entirely on performing their jobs well. When you know what you’re supposed to do at each stage in a process, you can devote your attention to quality — to carrying out each sub-task to the best of your abilities.
What does this mean for your IT business? Three words: better service delivery.
Work on Your Masterpiece
Your business is your baby. Your masterpiece. Your pride and joy. You built it from the ground up, and every aspect — from your company name to your office décor — should bear the mark of your personality.
If this doesn’t resonate, you might want to start thinking of your business in the above terms — as something you appreciate for its own sake, and not merely as a means to an end. If your business is nothing more than a steppingstone to retirement, to wealth … to whatever, you’re in trouble. Why?
Because growing a successful IT company from scratch takes genuine passion. If you don’t care about your business in the same obsessive, detail-oriented way that artists care about their art, you’re simply not going to put in the work required to succeed.
Working on process is boring and painful if you don’t really love what you do. But when you have genuine passion — when you have a true vision — working on process can be deeply gratifying. There’s a unique pleasure that comes from making small tweaks to something you’ve worked hard to bring into existence.
Picture the car enthusiast in his garage, tinkering away on his custom hot rod. Picture the writer, hunched over a draft of her novel, removing a comma … putting it back. That needs to be you.
Documentation is, at its core, all about details. Making sure your core business processes are streamlined at every step of the way. This isn’t something you do once, either. It’s continuous. Perfecting your IT business’s processes is itself a process — ongoing and ever-evolving. Documentation without a documentation management strategy — a systematic policy for reviewing and updating documents — is just dead weight. A waste of time.
Do you embrace documentation as a powerful tool for process improvement at your IT business? Remember, if you don’t, your employees won’t either.
Level Up Your Documentation with IT Glue
Documentation shouldn’t be something you do because you’re ‘supposed to.’ It should be something you do in order to help your business operate more efficiently and profitably. And, like any business investment, spending time and money on documentation will only yield a healthy ROI if you go about things carefully, intelligently, and systematically. Now, it’s possible to develop effective documentation protocols without the help of specialized software — but why makes things harder on yourself?
IT Glue is a best-in-class, SOC-2 compliant documentation software that helps MSPs of all sizes implement and maintain a cost-effective documentation strategy. If you own a growing IT business and want to take your documentation to the next level, nothing will get you there faster than IT Glue. There’s a reason over 200,000 people use IT Glue — it works!
Every company could sum up their brand story by saying, “We saw a market opportunity to perform our service better than the competition.” Much of the time, it would be a true story. Customers, though, demand a little embellishment with a brand story when comparing options.
A brand story has become a window into what a company represents. It’s an abstract retelling of how they operated and explains where they’re looking to go. We want tales of heroism, not tales of a technician wanting to make more money by starting an IT company.
You don’t need to lie; you just need to retell the story hitting the points that matter to how you want to represent yourself. A résumé isn’t going to include if you wet the bed until you were seven or if your grades dipped during a rough semester in college. Likewise, your brand story serves as the cover letter to the résumé of why a client should work with you.
What does your company do and what do you stand for? How do you define what you do, why you do it and how you do it? Your story should gloss over the mundane and focus on the (true) differentiating aspects of your business.
Defining What You Do
A brand story should explain what a company does. What do you do at your core, and how do you convey that to the widest audience? Keep it simple. Any company could write a 200-page book about their story, but that doesn’t mean anyone wants to read it.
You want to have a small company vision statement or mission statement. This is the ideal of what you do, and the idea needs to be transmuted into an ideal for your audience. For example, my company’s mission statement is this: “At The 20, we look to grow your MSP like we learned to grow ours.” It’s a simple idea, but it packs a punch. In 15 words, we’ve shared with our audience the specifics of what we do and our reasons for doing them.
Why You Do It
When someone relates to your brand story, it’s usually because they’ve seen the value in it. Either you’ve succeeded especially well at what you do, or you do something that no one else does. They want to know why you started on that journey.
Not every story is going to be a romantic one about following one’s passion. All of us have done things we don’t want to do in order to make it to the next opportunity. That doesn’t mean you didn’t find a purpose on the way.
Your brand story should answer these questions: What does your brand do and why did it grow the way it did? If one of these is more romantic than the other, feel free to take some artistic license with the material. When customers shop, do they want the one that does it because “it makes a lot of money,” or the one that does it because they love it? It doesn’t matter that both companies, if honest, are in it for money. When a company representative asks why you want to work for them in an interview, saying “for a paycheck” will probably get you shown the door, but other answers will take you to the next step. As with an interview, you need to make sure your brand story fits your abilities.
How You Did It
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is overused as a quote because it’s so accurate. You can have the best intentions, but the implementation makes the difference for whether it works or not. When telling your brand story, reflect your ideals, not necessarily the mistakes you made to learn them. The best house built on a bad foundation is a bad house. Your story needs to show how you’ve moved past failure and capitalized on success. Even if you did everything wrong before, how did it make you end up on the right path moving forward?
Explain this part of the story with language your customer can understand. Anyone can say they can perform a task, but it is essential to not baffle potential customers with technical jargon or gibberish. For customers, understanding the method or process you use is as important as the reason you do it in the first place.
Building A Narrative
Build your brand story by sharing what you do, explaining why you do it and describing how you do it. You don’t need to write it out in this order, but this is the order to plan how you will tell your story. If someone is searching for a service, they want to find one that does what they need above anything else.
The last factor ties everything together: How does the team do what they do while adhering to the reason why they do it? Things may change, and the narrative should change with it. Failures either break you, or serve as a catalyst to success. What potential customers want to know is: Now that you’ve learned the hard lessons, where is your brand going?
IT Documentation: Do it for Your Business!
Good IT documentation saves an MSP money by saving it A LOT of time.
If you own an IT business, chances are you’ve heard about the glorious benefits of proper IT documentation practices. How they can make your technicians’ lives dramatically easier and save your business tons of time, and thus, tons of money.
But just how much time do your employees waste due to poor documentation practices, anyway? How many hours a day? A month? A year? And what about you?
You may not be able to give precise answers to these questions. But there’s a good chance you radically underestimate the number of hours — and dollars — that are lost at your MSP due to inefficient uses of time. And there’s also a good chance you radically underestimate how much of that time you could win back through better documentation.
The good news is that it’s not your fault — not entirely, at least. It’s hard to judge just how much the little things add up when you’re busy running the rest of your business. But it’s essential to take control of your destiny and your business to make things more efficient for you and your clients. By the end of this blog post, two things should be clear, if they’re not already:
It’s all too easy to underestimate how much time (and money) your MSP wastes.
It’s all too easy to underestimate how much time (and money) better documentation practices would save your IT business.
Time Wasted: Take it with a Grain of Rice — Not Salt
Maybe you’ve heard the following story from Indian folklore …
A man invents the game of chess and shows the emperor his creation. The emperor is so impressed by the man’s ingenuity that he allows the man to name his reward. The man asks for rice. Specifically, one grain for the first square of his chess board, two for the second, four for the third, and so on, the grains doubling each successive square. “No problem,” the emperor says, feeling happy to grant the man his humble request.
But the “humble request” turns out to be anything but. How much rice has the emperor promised? A ton. Actually, that’s a vast understatement, for in truth it’s actually
trillions of tons. To fill the entire board in the manner proposed, the emperor will need 2⁶⁴ grains of rice, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 grains. That’s a lot of rice.
But what does any of this have to do with documentation? Quite a bit, actually. What the above story illustrates is human beings’ pronounced tendency to underestimate the power of accumulation. We simply don’t realize how quickly things add up.
This applies to time wasted as much as it does to grains of rice. If you’re a business owner, it can be easy to either overlook, underestimate, or ignore how small inefficiencies add up into huge wastes of time and money. But the right information and the right expertise can help resolve this issue for you and your organization.
The Cost of Inefficiency
Experts estimate that workers in technical fields waste about 20% of their time trying to track down information that should be at their fingertips. So, in an 8-hour workday, a technician is likely to spend around 1.6 hours just looking for information, much of which proper documentation protocols would have made readily available. Let’s put a dollar amount on this …
Say your MSP employs 5 technicians. If they waste 20% of their time searching for information and you pay them an average annual salary of 60k dollars, that means you’re losing almost 7k dollars each week on account of poorly organized information. And that’s before factoring in opportunity costs! When you factor in opportunity costs, you’re losing an additional $13,824 per week (based on a gross margin % of 50). In total, that’s …
More than 20k dollars a month! ‘Yikes’ is right. (You can use IT Glue’s “Cost of Waste” calculator to estimate the cost of time wasted at your company due to information not being easily accessible. Just plug in the relevant information — number of techs, their average salary, etc. — and voilà, you’ll see just how much inefficiency is hurting your bottom line.)
Insidious Interruptions
Here’s another somewhat startling statistic: A study by UC Irvine found that an office worker takes, on average, 23 minutes to refocus after an interruption. And having to track down a coworker for critical information during a call with a customer — you better believe that constitutes an interruption! Having to dig for crucial information that’s hidden in discrete silos can completely ruin your techs’ flow and lower their morale. This is likely to taint the customer service experience that your MSP’s reputation relies on. We start to see how the effects of inefficiency ripple outward.
But with a robust and centralized system of documentation in place, your techs can assist clients not only more swiftly, but more smoothly and confidently. A chef who has to cook a meal while simultaneously trying to find the recipe, the steps of which are hidden all over the kitchen, all while juggling knives … Yeah, that’s not going to be a happy chef. And that chef is no different from an IT tech who has to help a customer while trying to track down the information needed to provide quality assistance. So, write down your MSP’s ‘recipes’ (i.e., standard operating procedures) so your techs can serve up tasty IT support with confidence, instead of sloppily prepared meals thrown together under stress.
Don’t Listen to Your Gut
Here’s the bottom line: If your MSP doesn’t have its ducks in a row when it comes to documentation, your technicians are likely wasting tons of time not only tracking down information, but refocusing once they’ve found it. And once they’ve refocused, they’re often going to be facing a frustrated client whose patience is running thin — yet one more obstacle to working smoothly and efficiently.
Just like the grains of rice in the legend, it all adds up — all of these inefficiencies caused by inadequate documentation. It’s easy to underestimate or just plain overlook the sum of all these time wastages. Again, that’s just what humans do. From MSP owners to emperors, we’re all prone to misjudging the power of accumulation.
But once you know about a bias, it’s easier to combat it. So, going forward, keep in mind that you’re ‘wired’ to underestimate how much time your MSP wastes on account of bad documentation. On a gut level, your documentation problem may not feel like a huge problem. But as we’ve seen, our guts aren’t always great guides when it comes to cumulative processes, whether they involve rice or time.
Documentation Works … If You Do Too!
Just as the time an MSP loses to bad documentation accumulates sneakily, often going unnoticed or underestimated, so too does the time an MSP wins back once they get their documentation practices in order.
What this means is that it’s vital that you pay attention to how documentation is affecting your organization’s overall productivity and efficiency. More specifically, track data; you can’t expect to appreciate the impact that documentation is having on your MSP if you rely on casual observation. Wield the power of analytics to determine what sort of effect changes in your documentation strategies have on KPIs. And remember, the benefits of good documentation practices are not immediate; efficiency and productivity may take an initial dip while your MSP adjusts to new documentation protocols.
It can be useful to set aside time every quarter, or even every month, to go over your MSP’s documentation. Documentation isn’t something you set up once and never think about again. It’s an ongoing and evolving record of your
organization’s core operational processes. When a tech figures out a better way of solving a particular IT issue, update your SOPs accordingly.
It boils down to this: For documentation to work, you have to work on it. That’s why a lot of MSPs end up failing to harness the power of documentation; as in any industry, a willingness to put in the work is what separates the winners from the losers in the MSP space — the multi-million-dollar MSPs from the ones barely scraping by. But don’t just work hard, work smart. And remember, the right tools and expertise can enable you to do more with less.
Invest in Documentation
Documentation isn’t something to cut corners on. The reason to implement a new documentation regime at your MSP is the same reason you do anything as a business owner: you want to maximize profitability. But for documentation to serve that end, you can’t just do it; you have to do it well. So don’t document just to document. Do it to improve your IT company’s process and, in turn, its profitability. And this means doing it thoroughly, consistently, and thoughtfully.
If you’re committed to getting serious about documentation, and implementing documentation practices at your MSP that will actually save your business time and money in the long run, consider using IT Glue for all of your documentation needs. Using documentation software makes documentation immeasurably easier, and if you’re going to use documentation software, it’s a good idea to go with the trusted choice of the world’s top MSPs. There’s a reason over 200,000 people use IT Glue: it works!
Infrastructure matters. When your network or applications unexpectedly fail or crash, IT downtime can have a direct impact on your bottom line and ongoing business operations. In some extreme cases, data and monetary losses from unplanned outages can even cause a company to go out of business!
IT Downtime Factors
The industry average cost of IT downtime is dependent on a lot of areas. The monetary losses vary when you consider your revenue, industry, the actual duration of the outage, the number of people impacted, the time of day, etc. For example, losses are significantly higher per hour for businesses who are based on high-level data transactions, like banks and online retail sales. If you experience an unplanned outage during peak traffic time, obviously the damage will be more significant.
According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. Because there are so many differences in how businesses operate, downtime, at the low end, can be as much as $140,000 per hour, $300,000 per hour on average, and as much as $540,000 per hour at the higher end.
98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. 81% of respondents indicated that 60 minutes of downtime costs their business over $300,000. 33% of those enterprises reported that one hour of downtime costs their firms $1-5 million.
Indirect Costs of IT Downtime
But there are other costs that don’t often show up in dollar form. That’s the cost of interruptions, especially when IT professionals are interrupted from what might be more productive work.
Take, for example, the interruption that occurs when someone pops into your office to tell you that your email server is down. That interruption, of course, takes the time it takes, plus the time to fix the problem. But did you know, according to a study by UC Irvine, that it often takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus and get your head back in the game after an interruption?
As once reported in the Washington Post, interruptions consume, on average, 238 minutes per day. In addition, the time to get started back up after an interruption consumes another 84 minutes a day. The time lost to stress and fatigue steals another 50 minutes a day.
All that adds up to about 6.2 hours per day, or 31 hours per week lost to interruptions! Is it any wonder we’re spending most of our time treading water?
The truth is that no business is immune to the corrosive effects of downtime when it comes to customer — as well as employee — retention, productivity, and standing in the marketplace. Downtime is extremely expensive, and in ways that can make or break the success of your organization. At the same time, it’s essentially unavoidable, because technology architectures are becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable.
Downtime and Cybersecurity
Downtime is costly enough when it results from purely accidental failures in your technology. But when downtime is the result of nefarious behavior by hackers and other threat actors, the monetary consequences can start to skyrocket at an alarming, often business-ruining rate.
The statistics on this are sobering: A 2017 study found that SMBs spend, on average, approximately $117k dollars to recover from a cyberattack. And the SMBs that do recover are the lucky ones, as nearly two thirds of SMBs have to close up shop within six months of a hack or data breach, as reported by the National Cyber Security Alliance. And it’s not just the big companies who suffer from cybercrime, either. Verizon’s 2019 Investigations Report revealed that 60% of cyberattacks affected SMBs.
And now with more and more employees working from home, companies face an even tougher battle against cybercrime. Remote work has “contributed dramatically to the rise in successful ransomware attacks,” says Israel Barak, chief information security officer at Cybereason.
Downtime caused by threat actors comes with the usual costs of downtime — the costs of not being able to do business — plus a plethora of additional costs, such as the ransom payments that companies make to hackers after a ransomware attack. But perhaps the most insidious cost of a data breach is reputational damage. A survey put out by Security.org found that almost one in four Americans stop doing business with a company after it suffers a data breach.
Preparing for IT Downtime
So, what can you do? Are there any positives in all of this?
The best news — and what really matters — is that simply taking a few steps to prepare for an outage can make a huge difference. You can, for instance, take the time to define which services require the most prioritized response, have contingency plans in place, leverage post-mortems to improve processes, and conduct regular testing.
By taking the time to implement a plan for addressing inevitable downtime, your organization stands to realize thousands — or even millions — of dollars in quantifiable cost savings, as well as ensure the health of crucial qualitative factors such as employee morale, brand reputation, and customer loyalty.
Windows 11
The Facts (and What They Mean for Your MSP)
Windows 11 is coming for all to enjoy! Well, for some of us to enjoy. Specifically, those of us with PCs that are equipped with a TPM 2.0 … or is it a TPM 1.2? And just which PCs are those, exactly? Also, when’s the release date? What about the free upgrade? When’s that coming? If you’re an SMB owner, should you hop right on the upgrade, or bide your time and milk the continued support of Windows 2010 for all it’s worth?
There’s a swarm of questions surrounding the imminent release of Microsoft’s brand new operating system, and like any good swarm, it’s creating quite a buzz. At times like this, it can be edifying to step away from the fray and take inventory of the facts at hand. So, what do we know about Windows 11—and what are we still waiting to find out? And how should owners of IT service providers be feeling about all of this? More importantly, what should they be doing?
What We Know (and Don’t Know) about Windows 11
Release Date
Microsoft announced that its new operating system will be here by “the holidays.” Most agree that it will happen sometime between October and December, although a growing chorus online is converging on a much more specific release date: October 20.
And just how did they come up with that? Well, they noticed a clock—the one in the snapshots featured on Microsoft’s announcement blog post for Windows 11. The snapshots show off various aspects of the company’s snazzy new UI. And it just so happens that the time shown in every single one of them is 11:11 a.m. The date’s also the same in all of them: October 20, 2021.
Coincidence? Or is Microsoft showing us instead of telling us that Windows 11 is dropping on October 20?
Honestly, no one knows—except for maybe a few select people over at Microsoft. We’ll just have to wait and see. We’ll also have to wait and see when exactly the free upgrade will be available (the “by the holidays” refers to new machines that come with Windows 11); at this point, all Microsoft has told us is to expect the free upgrade by early next year.
System Requirements
This is where things get messy. Microsoft didn’t exactly set a reassuring tone at the outset; with unclear documentation, evasive public statements, and a PC Health Checker app that just didn’t work, the company almost seemed intent on stirring up confusion and frustration. No such thing as bad press, right?
But clarifications have been made, specifications drawn up, documentation altered. Here’s what we now know—and what we don’t:
The following system requirements might not be set in stone, but they don’t seem to be up in the air, either. So, until notified to the contrary, we can assume that PCs will need to tick all the following boxes to be able to run Windows 11:
Processor: 2 or more cores running at 1+ GHz
Storage: 64+ GB
4+ GB of RAM
Security requirements: Secure Boot, TPM 2.0
Screen: At least 9 inches with 720p resolution or higher
Graphics card: compatible with DirectX 12 (or later) and WDDM 2.x.
Internet connectivity and a Microsoft account
Some of these aren’t surprising, or difficult to fulfill. Others, such as UEFI Secure Boot and the TPM 2.0, pose more of a challenge. To say the least, the above requirements are more stringent than many were expecting, and they shut out a lot of PCs from the Windows 11 party, including Microsoft’s own Surface Studio 2, which came out just a few years ago and costs a pretty penny ($3,499.99).
But just how many of the 1.2 billion machines currently running Windows 10 will be able to run Windows 11, and how many will be left out in the cold? And which ones?
If there were solid answers to these questions, we’d give them to you. But as things stand, there’s a good amount that we still don’t know.
For instance, we know that 8th generation Intel and AMD Zen 2 CPUs will be Windows 11 compatible, but what about 7th gen and Zen 1? Microsoft is looking into it. As for the TPM 2.0 requirement, just how absolute is it? Are there workarounds? Might a machine with a TPM 1.2 and the right tweaks slip through the Great Filter of Obsolescence?
Again, we’ll have to wait and see.
Windows 11 and Your Business
Not knowing what the system requirements are, finding out your brand-new, expensive PC doesn’t meet them—there’s no shortage of reasons to feel some frustration and anxiety about the imminent release of Windows 11.
Businesses and business owners face a particularly tough decision, especially those whose current PCs are among the millions of hapless machines that will be left out in the cold. The question will not be whether to upgrade, but when. Timing is everything and a careful consideration of the ROIs involved in different courses of action could be the difference between harnessing an upgrade for profit and letting it knock your business off track.
Support for Windows 10 will continue through October 14, 2025. So, if you’re a business facing a potentially expensive upgrade experience, just know you have a little time to make your plans.
Do What You Can Now
At this point, it’s a good idea to take some definitive steps in the right direction. For instance, you can check your systems for a TPM 2.0. Here’s how :
1) Right-click the Windows start button
2) Select “Device Manager”
3) Click the little arrow next to “Security devices”
If it says “Trusted Platform Module 2.0,” you’re good to go—on that requirement, at least. Figuring out whether your systems have Secure Boot implemented is a bit more complicated, and it can be a good idea to just contact your PC manufacturer for information on that.
Taking concrete action is always better than sitting around and worrying, catastrophizing, and complaining. If you want to be a successful business owner, it starts with you: your attitude, your tone, your habits. Be positive in the face of challenges and your employees will take your lead.
But being positive isn’t enough. You have to also be prepared. What is your upgrade strategy? Can you afford to upgrade to Windows 11 right away if doing so means purchasing a bunch of new machines? Can you afford not to?
Remember: Security is an Investment
The cost of not upgrading might seem abstract, but when it comes to security, this cost could become all too real. There’s a reason why Microsoft is demanding that PCs have Secure Boot and a TPM 2.0 in order to run Windows 11. That reason is security. The company is tired of being the target of hackers. Tired of being mauled by malware. So, with their stringent Windows 11 hardware requirements, they’re doing something about it.
Regardless of how you feel about the TPM 2.0 requirement, know this: As reported in this post, Microsoft was able to reduce malware instances by 60% in test devices using TPM-enabled security features such as Windows Hello and Secure Boot.
When making upgrade plans for your business, don’t let the inconvenience and up-front costs of an upgrade be the reason for a much, much larger inconvenience of a security breach down the road. There’s such thing as rushing the transition, but waiting too long is a very real danger.
We Can Help
The 20 is an exclusive group of MSPs who utilize shared resources, expertise, and tools to outpace the competition. When it comes to navigating the business side of your MSP, we’re your “Easy Button.” And when your MSP faces a challenging period of transition, we can help you make the necessary adjustments to keep your business on track, on a path to greater and greater growth.
Learn more about The 20’s unique all-in-one model for MSP success, and check out our latest security offering, ID 20/20, a multi-factor authentication solution that employs zero trust security principles to keep your end users—and your company—safe. We focus on keeping your data protected, so you can focus on growing your MSP.
Meet Michael of YourITgroup!
Tell us a little about your MSP…
Our HQ is in Boca Raton with support for the greater tri-county (MIA, Broward, Palm Beach) area. YourITgroup has been in business since 2001, new ownership (me) in 2015.
How long have you been a member of The 20?
We’ve been a member of The 20 for 6 years.
Why did your MSP originally look to partner with The 20?
Why re-invent the wheel? Work on the parts of the business that will grow it.
Tell us about the biggest change in your business since joining The 20.
Biggest change is our revenues. With Tim and The 20’s help and guidance, we have almost quintupled our MRR.
What do you like most about being a member of The 20?
Always being on the forefront: Security, Industry, etc. You know who the winners are? The ones that bolt out of the gates first. If you’re not first, you’re last.
What do you think is the most important quality necessary for success?
Sales and marketing focus. If you aren’t great at sales or not a people person, get someone who is STAT. Just like how we need to get our clients out of the mindset that IT is not an expense but a great investment, we too need to think that salespeople are not an expense but a great investment.
What are your biggest business challenges?
Managing the growth. It is true what they say, mo money – mo problems.
What are your areas of focus for 2021?
Compliance – I believe CMMC or some form of it will be the standard for most companies in 3-6 years
What advice would you share with an MSP looking to scale their business?
Be around people who have already done it. Their knowledge and guidance will shoot you there faster than anything else, period.
What book are you currently reading?
o Good to Great – Jim Collins
o Chief Joy Officer – Richard Sheridan
o Radical Candor – Kim Scott
Favorite blogs/podcasts
The Tony Robbins Podcast
Interested in becoming a member like YourITgroup? Click here for more information!
IT Documentation: Do it for Your Techs!
Documentation isn’t boring. That’s right, you heard it here first. It isn’t merely ‘paperwork.’ Nor is it an inconvenience or a necessary evil, something that MSPs have to ‘put up with.’ At least, it doesn’t have to be. Not if you look at it from the right angle.
In essence, documentation is writing things down. And, in the business world, it is an expression of and means to greater operational maturity. In other words, robust documentation practices not only reflect, but reinforce mature business practices.
And just what might those be? That one’s easy—mature business practices are the kind that make your MSP money! However you feel about documentation, the fact remains: An effective documentation management strategy can save your MSP tons of time and money.
In this, the first of a series of blog posts devoted to documentation, we will consider how documentation makes your technicians’ work lives easier and more productive. But before we dive into that topic, a few general remarks on what makes documentation such a powerful business tool …
Documentation is Paying Attention
Documentation facilitates an honesty that comes only from truly paying attention. When your IT business’s SOPs exist mostly in your head (and perhaps the heads of your more experienced techs), they can seem a lot more efficient and effective than they really are. But writing them down, and then, reading what you’ve written … well, that entire process has a way of clearing away the fog of ego and revealing the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Documenting your business means really looking at it.
Getting Your Technicians on Board
MSP owners face a distinct challenge when it comes to implementing more and better documentation protocols at their companies. Technicians aren’t, generally speaking, huge fans of documentation. So, pushing a pro-documentation agenda can make you look like the ‘bad guy.’ This is a serious issue, because no matter how slick and elegant your documentation protocols are, without your technicians’ buy-in, they’re just a bunch of rules.
Documentation protocols become documentation practices when the people in your company take them seriously. But how are you supposed to convince your MSP employees that documentation isn’t a bitter pill to swallow, but something to relish?
The solution to the problem of how to instill a documentation culture at your MSP isn’t itself documented. There’s no algorithm you can follow for garnering employee support and enthusiasm. How you go about doing it is largely idiosyncratic. You know your employees and your management style (and if you don’t, this is a wake-up call: get to know yourself ASAP!). Trust your instincts and be the leader you’re comfortable being.
That said, here are two pieces of general advice on how to get your techs to start (and not stop) practicing good documentation hygiene.
1. Be the change …
First piece of advice: be the change you want to see in your MSP. Attitude is contagious. As an MSP owner, what you think and feel about documentation will influence what your employees think and feel about documentation.
“Influence”—not “determine”; you can’t force your technicians to get excited about documentation, but you can do your part to chip away at their biases and their knee-jerk negative reactions. A positive attitude is immeasurably helpful here.
So, consciously foster in your own mind a favorable conception of documentation (e.g., view it as a ‘slick and modern tool capable of driving your MSP’s efficiency through the roof’ or as a ‘thoughtful and detail-oriented business practice that both reflects and reinforces operational maturity’).
2. Don’t force. Motivate …
Second piece of advice: If you frame your documentation conversation in terms of ‘you forcing your techs to do something they don’t want to do,’ you’re shooting yourself in the foot at the beginning of the race—using the starting gun! In business (and in life) forcing people to do things doesn’t work nearly as well as motivating people to do things.
When it comes to implementing a robust documentation culture at your MSP, you don’t want your techs’ obedience; you want their engagement. Without their active, willing involvement, you simply cannot sustain healthy documentation practices.
That’s why some MSPs are turning to gamification to incentivize documentation for technicians. Gamifying documentation makes it fun—well, more fun—and can help you get the ball rolling. But as an MSP owner, you shouldn’t have to rely too heavily on ‘tricks’ like gamification to motivate your techs to follow documentation protocols. That’s because of one simple truth:
Your techs are probably the people in your company who will benefit the most from a mature documentation management strategy. Your job is to convey this to them without hitting them over the head with it. Try working the following points into your conversation …
Why Your Techs Should Love Documentation (or At Least Hate it Less)
When your MSP gets serious about documentation—not only doing it, but doing it the right way—your techs will be able to do their jobs more easily, more efficiently, and just plain better. To be more specific, a solid documentation strategy can help your hardworking technicians …
• Stop having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Without a mature documentation system in place, your MSP’s techs will often have to reinvent the wheel when faced with a new IT issue or customer. Starting from scratch is hard, time-consuming, and prone to human error. But when your techs have a rich service database to consult—clearly written SOPs and detailed ticket notes—they never have to reinvent the wheel to solve a customer’s IT issue. The amount of time this will save your MSP is truly monumental.
• Not have to rely on their fallible brains so much. Written SOPs provide your techs with convenient checklists. Checklists have been used by pilots and surgeons for decades and with great success. The reason is simple: human beings are fallible, and we’re especially fallible when carrying out complex tasks in high pressure situations. So, when you give your techs checklists to carry out their service duties, you’re not implying that their jobs are easy or mechanical; on the contrary, you’re recognizing the inherent difficulty and complexity of their work. Like surgeons and pilots, IT techs ought to offload some cognitive work onto a checklist in order to save their brainpower for the more nuanced aspects of their job—the things that can’t be captured by a list.
• Make customers happy (or less angry, at least). Here’s a scenario: Say a tech goes out to lunch, and a customer whom that tech was helping calls your MSP’s service desk. Here’s what happens when your company has good documentation protocols in place: Another one of your techs can take the call, refer to their colleague’s ticket notes, and pick up right where that colleague left off. This is obviously highly efficient, and it also means that the tech won’t have to ask the customer a bunch of things that their lunch-eating colleague already asked, during the initial call. Why is this important? Because the last thing—the last thing—a frustrated customer wants to do is repeat themselves.
• Spend less time and energy on training new hires. This is a big one. When you hire a new technician, there’s a lot that person needs to learn in order to become a productive member of your company. Without detailed documents that explain how they’re supposed to do their job (internal documentation), the task of training them falls entirely on your more experienced techs. But with such documents, new hires can largely train themselves, leaving your experienced techs more time to tackle the sophisticated IT issues you pay them to deal with. This makes everyone happier, but also, it saves you money—in-person training is costly!
• Avoid awkward stalemates with customers. Sometimes customers are unhappy with the IT service your MSP provided them. Sometimes these customers lodge formal complaints. Sometimes these complaints are … aggressive. When this happens, and there isn’t sufficient documentation of the services received, it’s your word against theirs, your tech’s word against the customer’s. Sure, the customer’s always right—but you don’t want to throw your tech under the bus, or accept fault without knowing what really happened. Dealing with an upset customer is never going to be fun, but documentation gives you something solid to point to when things get testy and turbulent, and it allows for greater overall transparency and accountability in your business culture.
At the end of the day, proper documentation practices are geared towards one thing: making it easier for your techs to access the critical IT info required to carry out their duties. It takes time to build a streamlined, centralized, and comprehensive documentation platform, but the amount of time such a platform saves your MSP in the long run is truly on a different order of magnitude.
IT Glue: Helping You Fight Information Sprawl
Building a productive documentation culture at your MSP is hard work, and it takes time. As your MSP grows, so too does the amount of information flowing through your business. Organizing and managing all that info with proper documentation procedures, and in a way that boosts revenue and improves workflow, can feel daunting—to say the least!
IT Glue is an industry-leading, SOC-2 compliant documentation software that allows MSPs of all sizes to develop and maintain a robust and cost-effective documentation management strategy. If you’re the owner of a growing MSP and you want to get serious about documentation, but you don’t know where to start, start with IT Glue.
Learn more about IT Glue’s suite of features and robust integrations to see why thousands of MSPs have chosen IT Glue for all of their documentation needs.
VISION 2021 – Why You Don’t Want to Miss Out!
VISION 2021 provides two days of compelling speakers, educational sessions, and networking focused on MSP business best practices, thought leadership, and growth.
Join world-class MSPs and ITSPs for two days of non-stop learning and a wealth of insightful sessions. The conference is supercharged with content catered to every member of your MSP team, from tech to exec.
Connect with IT professionals and experts from around the world. Exchange best practices and share tips, tricks, and secrets for success with a powerful network of MSPs.
Here are the top 10 reasons you don’t want to miss #VISION21:
100% Live Event
Our event is fully live. Not virtual, not hybrid, 100% live. We’re all ready to get back to live events and we have an awesome 2 days planned.
Attendees
Come surround yourself with the nations top MSPs, share best practices & network with like minded business owners.
Sponsors
We have a full slate of industry leading vendors including Datto, Dell, Huntress Labs and more.
Killer Content
Come learn results generating strategies to grow and scale your MSP!
Location
The event is being held in Arlington, Texas at live at Lowe’s right next to the Dallas Cowboy and Rangers stadium.
Breakout Sessions
Breakout sessions, along with our main stage speakers! We have a wide variety of breakouts covering technical training to sales and everything in between.
Party
Nobody parties like The 20! Join us for live music, drinks & dancing.
The Year of the Return
Our theme this year is the year of the return, we have a kick off reception on the 28th which will include an actual delorean based off the Back to the future franchise.
The 20
If you are an MSP looking to grow and scale your business come hear from the best with sessions from our CEO Tim Conkle.
Speakers
We have a great line up of speakers covering a wide range of topics. Our keynote speaker this year is Maye Musk. Maye is a best selling author, model, trend maker and rule changer with a fascinating family. She’s mother to three incredibly successful entrepreneurs – Elon, Kimbal, and Tosca.
Join us at VISION for an incredible conversation with the amazing Maye Musk! Register Now!
