Established Strategies to Cut Fat from Your MSP Company Business Plan

An MSP company that incorporates a “lean” business plan is likely to have greater flexibility and success in its startup endeavors. The same success can be seen for more established companies looking to reinvent themselves, but they’ll have a much longer uphill battle. Still, there are cumulative benefits for all involved in the design and promulgation of a “lean” business plan. Several particulars of such a strategy include:

• Determining your business intentions
• Identifying problems your operation solves
• Defining your solutions
• Ensuring you’re targeting efforts appropriately
• Identifying competitors and separating yourself

Determining Your Business Intentions

What is the raison d’etre, or reason to be, of your MSP company? What are your ultimate intentions? In the hit HBO series, Silicon Valley, the intentions of the protagonist’s tech company, Pied Piper, were to build a compression algorithm which helped to decentralize storage, making smartphones more utilitarian. But their goals morphed as they realized the services they were striving to provide could actually facilitate, in the fictional universe of the show, a new kind of internet. Well, with your own business, as you determine what constitutes your end game, you may find additional products or services to provide. If you don’t establish intentions from the start, you could end up firing off in a dozen different directions which ultimately end up being fruitless.

Identifying Problems Your Operation Solves

Part of understanding your business’s intentions revolves around understanding the problems your operation solves. You need to know what kind of value you’re actually bringing, how, and why. Also, you need to know which problems your operation can solve at the greatest cost-effectiveness. If you only make 10% profit on a problem-resolution cycle, that may not be sustainable.

Defining Your Solutions

When you know your business’s overarching intentions and the kind of problems you solve, you’ll be better enabled to provide exact solutions for clients. For example, perhaps a problem you solve involves the cost associated with in-house server arrays. Perhaps the solution you provide involves hybridization of cloud and on-site technology as fits the client’s needs. Whatever the case, you need to have a “packaged”, as it were, suite of provided solutions.

Ensuring You’re Targeting Efforts Appropriately

All of these calibration techniques for the “rifle” of your lean business plan are useless if you’re not aiming them in the right direction. You need to know your target demographic and you need to aim operations that direction.

Identifying Competitors and Separating Yourself

Last but certainly not least, you need to know with your competitors and identify the qualities of your operation which make you unique. These idiosyncratic qualities of your business are apt to make you more desirable to potential clients, likely resulting in increased profitability and client conversion.

The Lean Approach

An MSP company that takes a lean approach to business planning is like a sniper, as opposed to someone that’s just “praying and spraying”. With better aimed “shots” or business ventures, you can hit harder targets with greater accuracy and reliability.