Growing your profit by becoming an MSP mastermind

If growing your MSP business is taking a huge amount of effort and resources, and you want to start grabbing easier wins, and making more passive income, this blog’s for you. Let’s look at some of the key ways that you can turn your business model around, improve your work/life balance, and start taking home greater revenues at the end of each month.

The three main issues that impact today’s MSPs

Let’s start by understanding the problems. They usually fall into at least one of the following three categories.

1. Not enough balance

You love work, and it keeps you incredibly busy! Your spouse would love you to be around more, you hardly see the kids, and you have zero time left at the end of the week for any personal hobbies. While you’re making money – is it worth this intense focus and time-zap?

2. Not enough money

How can you be working this hard, and yet you’re still struggling to make ends meet? Are there secret ways to make your MSP business more efficient that you haven’t managed to uncover? How is everyone else doing it?

3. Not enough time

When you’re working 9-5, (or let’s face it, 24/7) to answer client problems and put out customer fires, there isn’t a lot left for marketing your MSP business. How are you going to find more customers, identify upsell opportunities, and grow your business beyond being the IT fix-it guys?

Changing the paradigm

If you recognize yourself in any of those descriptions, let me ask you a question. Wouldn’t you like to make more money, free up space for growing your business, and have more time to yourself, too? Here are some ways to leverage Atera to make that happen.

Get better at customer support

Happy customers tell their friends about you and stick around to see what you’re going to offer them next. Rather than waiting around for your clients to need you, get proactive about the way you offer services. One great example that was ‘win of the year’ for so many of our MSPs was Atera’s Customer Remote Access. When the pandemic hit the headlines, nearly all businesses were sent into lockdown, and working from home was for many, a totally new reality. Our MSPs were able to support their customers with full work from home solution, allowing them to log into their office computers remotely, losing no time and enabling full business continuity.

From big wins like customer remote access, down to details like improving ticket resolution times, (and being able to prove it with easily shareable reports on customer support) keep your customers smiling, and you’ll find that a lot of the marketing starts happening behind the scenes, via word of mouth.

Streamline your internal processes

Have you ever wondered if your technology is slowing you down? That was one of the reasons why we launched Atera all of those years ago, seeing a huge gap in the market for an all in one RMM and PSA that streamlined IT operations. No more going back and forth between systems of record, duplicating effort, and wasting resources. Instead, MSPs can manage everything all in one place. It’s also the reason why we keep growing the platform to include best-of-breed integrations with everything from billing and invoicing, to security.

Now, ask yourself this. How much time do you spend on repetitive and manual tasks? Don’t tell us – we already know it’s too much! Think about the actions that you complete every time you onboard a new client, every time a single piece of software gets updated, or every time you need to do a simple job that comes up time and time again for your customers. Now, automate them.

Some will be easy if you’re using the right software, such as automating software install and update via Chocolatey and Homebrew from within the Atera console. Others might need you to leverage other MSPs’ experience, such as checking out the Atera Shared Script Library. You might even want to get creative with Powershell and see what you can spin up for yourself. Whatever method you choose, automation is the route to managing your time more effectively, allowing you to charge the same fee each month, but reduce the amount of effort and resources it takes to meet customer expectations.

Automate opportunities

Once you’ve automated your existing processes, now’s the time to see what’s on the table waiting to be picked up. Your monthly recurring revenues, also known as MRR is a really important metric to track, and one that will help you to grow. But systemizing and improving your upselling to add new services to your MRR can be time-consuming.

Of course, not at Atera! Our Network Discovery Opportunities solution was one of our fan favorites of 2020 and helped so many of you to add to your business with an upselling platform that works on your behalf. In the Opportunities console, you’ll see an itemized list of upselling ideas that you can float with your customers at your next QBR, with no effort on your side. Your customer will be delighted to see you’re being proactive about support and consultation, and you can quickly and easily add to your own business bottom line.

Be confident in your own abilities

Think for a moment about the difference between a Ferrari and a Ford. Both are cars, and both are intended to get you from A to B. The difference in the price tag comes down to a few differences in mechanics, and of course, the name on the side of the tin. Do you want to be a Ferrari or a Ford? The difference is largely up to you.

With Atera’s in-built tools, you’re ready to spend less time on repetitive and manual tasks, and more time growing your business, but your profit margins are largely up to you. Take on clients that truly value what you can bring to the relationship, namely – your years of experience and unparalleled support and consultation. Putting a fair price tag on that value might bring alarm bells or imposter syndrome knocking at your door, but remember that you’re backing it up with your quality of service.

Becoming an MSP Mastermind starts right there, by mastering your mind, making a decision to grow your MSP business, and leveraging the right technologies to make it a reality.