Guns and Butter

'Guns and Butter is an economic term to illustrate options in resource allocation.  Do you (as a country) pour your efforts into your military?  Into your people?  Or some of one and some of the other?  If the latter, what ratios do you use?

Your MSP business faces a similar quandary, except replace Guns & Butter with RMM & PSA.  You've only limited development time and resources - where will you spend them?

Having been with LabTech for five years now, I've spoken with countless IT support companies in the process of transitioning to a Managed Service Providership.  These companies have similarly numerous philosophies on how to do it so I've seen all sides of the coin - some houses only want RMM, others treat it as a necessary evil and focus all available efforts on the PSA.

(Warning: potential RMM bias alert!) It seems to me your RMM is the meat and potatoes of your MSP business and everything else is... well, everything else.  While not optimal, I'm sure I can provide (much!) more value to my customers being RMM heavy as opposed to being PSA heavy.  Sure I may be losing a few bucks in inefficiencies but then again, maybe I'm not if you consider the savings of NOT building that tracking.

No, of course I'm not advocating you just let rip and 'see what happens'.  That's a poor business model no matter how capable you are.  Conversely so is micro-managing.  What do I mean by that?  Let me give you some example questions I've heard to demonstrate:

How do I make LabTech add time for every automatic remediation it performs?  How do I track this?
How do I detect a new workstation or computer has come into the environment and pro-rate the introduction date against the monthly rate?

The problem with this strategy is that this is yesterday's business model - and the world is changing.  The above questions assume we're trading time for money but the philosophy behind MSP is exactly opposite.  We need to deliver a more 21st century business model.  Something a little more...  Netflix(ish).  Their model: give us a buck a month and have all ya want for that month.  'Ya ate a ton?  Great!  Ya ate nothing?  Great!'  Either way, the next question is: 'Would you like another month of service?'  Now, instead of bean counting they can focus their efforts almost exclusively to service delivery (and new subscriber acquisitions.)  Not a bad business model, eh?

If you focus your efforts almost exclusively on your customer's environment, you'll soon be stunned how little effort is required to maintain it.  First you'll need to learn how to script - in Windows and in LabTech.  Learn application packaging and automate both deployment and onboarding events.  Learn policy management and apply it using both Active Directory and LabTech (bonus points for using LabTech to automate Active Directory GPO's)  Do these things and you'll find no matter what your customer comes up with, not only can you do it - you can automate it.  This is the core of profitability for a Managed Service Provider.

Of course you'll want to do some risk mitigation (e.g. structure it so if LabTech agents are removed, ALL your automation ceases operation within the environment.)  Now, bill like the insurance companies do: based upon risk.  Does your customer insist everyone needs to be a local administrators?  That should cost more than a more regulated environment.  Are you enabled to automatically push anti-virus to any computer without it?  If so, that should ease the cost of providing MSP services as there a little less risk.

There are other considerations to this tactic.  Next, we'll talk about hiring 300 and the inherently disruptive nature of this business model (and the natural implications of such.)  Stay tuned!