Years ago, business owners sought resellers who could provide technologies to streamline operations. Today, business owners need more from resellers than just technology. So, what can resellers do to stand out while staying ahead of changes in technology and consumer behavior?
What does it mean to be a successful MSP? In the current landscape, there’s really no final destination for this. The MSP business as a whole is in a constant state of change – of evolution. What once made an MSP profitable, is no longer sufficient. Rather than reaching a final destination, success for MSPs is now characterized by their ability to keep up with the change, or better yet, stay ahead of it. So what can you do to ensure your MSP is in a good position to adapt to these changes? We put together some thoughts.
So you want to reap the benefits of automation, but don’t have the expertise to leverage an API. We’re here to tell you that it’s easier than you think.
To thrive in the new rapidly changing landscape, resellers should take a hard look in the mirror and ask two questions: Who is my competition? and What can I do to succeed in a rapidly evolving industry?
Moving from break-fix to managed services can seem overwhelming at first. However, once you dig in, you’ll find the work is well worth it. Managed service provider (MSPs) build steadier recurring revenue from clients than their break-fix counterparts.
MSP leaders often spent a good part of their careers working as a VAR and in the systems integration business, where revenue often comes in large but sporadic doses. Transitioning to a recurring-revenue MSP model can be tough for these people since monthly services income can feel more like a trickle than a fire hose—and it can create pretty painful cash-flow challenges.
You can’t effectively manage your clients’ IT infrastructure if you don’t have access to up-to-date information on it. Yet, many MSPs are falling into this trap; attempting to manage their clients’ networks with outdated or incomplete documentation, which is riddled with blind spots and prone to inaccuracies.
Last year’s GDPR implementation was fun, wasn’t it? If you’re in the UK, you went through all of that, not really knowing how long that rule would apply to your business. At the time of writing, you still don’t really know, because the status of Brexit is uncertain. While we here at IT Glue cannot force the politicians to remove this uncertainty altogether, we can provide some advice as to what the issues are going to be for you, especially in light of a no-deal Brexit. The way we see it, a no-deal Brexit will impact MSPs in four key ways.
Some things never get old. Data is not one of those things. When it comes to the data you rely on to run your business, the only thing worse than no data is stale-dated data. Pretty much everything you document will be fresh and relevant at the time you write it down, but nothing stays current forever. And stale data isn’t like style – it’s not going to suddenly become cool again in 20 years. No, it will still be worthless. Stale data is less like a classic sports car in need of a tune-up and more like a car propped up on blocks in the front of the yard.
Did you ever trek up to a famous lookout spot, only to find that once you get there the clouds have rolled in and you can’t see much of anything? Like the time I was in Rio and went up to the Christ the Redeemer statue and it was so foggy I couldn’t even see the top of the statue, much less the city below. I was only there for a day, and had already paid for the tour, so I didn’t have a whole lot of choice about going, even though I knew the weather was bad. I mean, nobody in their right mind would choose to have such terrible visibility, right?
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