Can You Keep Your MSP Business from Sinking like the Titanic?
Times have been great in tech for several years now and this includes the MSP business. Unprecedented growth in markets, as well as technology, is driving adoption of managed services at incredible rates. The benefits to clients are massive, and the benefits to your company should be massive, too.
However, it’s not all plain sailing. There are business risks out there that could cause any business to go under if any of a number of big mistakes is made. To help keep your business in fine health, make sure to avoid the following common big mistakes.
Don’t Try to Reinvent the Wheel
If you’re a business management genius, may have the experience, skill, creativity, and intelligence needed to run your unique business in your unique way, while still delivering on the bottom line. If that is the case, maybe business advice is where you should be focusing your efforts.
For the rest of us, however, simply keeping on top of the challenging aspects of your own business’s USP is enough work. Don’t create bigger headaches for yourself by trying to reinvent the wheel in other areas of your business. There are established protocols and processes that work and work well for managing all areas of a business. Follow those!
By adopting and maintaining industry standard approaches to all areas of your business that aren’t about your own unique product or service, you engineer the freedom to be more creative with your deliverables. When it comes to things like HR and accounting, for example, you may want to be rather ‘boring’. But by applying a templated approach to these parts of your organization, you know they will be stable and dependable. This lets you focus your creative energies on the components of your MSP business that let you stand apart from the competition.
Failing to Plan
“Failing to plan is planning to fail.”
One area of business management in which it is particularly important to follow industry norms is planning. Yes, it’s an old saying that failing to plan is planning to fail but it’s so true. After all, if you don’t have any goals, how can you know if you’re succeeding. And if you don’t have any goals, how can you map out how you’ll achieve them?
If you don’t map out how to achieve your goals, how can you possibly know what you’re doing every day? That’s why planning is so vitally important. By developing a good business plan, you’re freed up to create a strategy aimed at delivering on that plan. And a business plan need not be set in stone. Obviously, the weather can change drastically, forcing a review of the existing business plans
Lacking Flexibility
You may have drawn up the best business plan the world has ever seen but unless you have the world’s best crystal ball, you cannot know exactly what the future has in store. That means you need to be ready to change. And sometimes, that change needs to be made very quickly. By ensuring your business is flexible and ready for change if required, you avoid hitting those rocks that suddenly loom up out of the fog.
Not Maintaining Your Stores
Part of remaining flexible is keeping something in reserve. Yes, this can be a tough compromise. After all, some opportunities only come along once and taking advantage of them could mean going all-in. In reality, however, opportunity is always out there. If you don’t have spare resources when opportunities come up, you can’t jump on them. This is what ‘making your own luck’ is all about.
Listen to Others
You don’t have to always do what other people say you should do. After all, it might not be their neck on the line. But the wise person always takes on board the advice of others. It’s not easy to admit you don’t know everything but doing so is actually one of the most intelligent things we can do. By keeping your eyes and ears open, and heeding others’ advice, you stand a far greater chance of keeping your MSP business on an even keel.
