An MSP will not grow without customers. And customers will not buy unless you sell them on Managed Services. If you’re a small MSP you are probably wondering how to best sell your service. I have been running a professional services small business of some kind or another for decades now, and what I have to share with you here are the things I constantly have to remind myself. This blog post is really written for me. But hopefully, it inspires you as well. Grit your teeth and raise your prices. Lets be honest. If you only have a few customers, I’m willing to bet you aren’t charging them a ton of money. Sometimes, as a new MSP, you’ll get that one big contract that carries you. But most of the time, even that one “big contract” is a ton of work for a moderate sum of money. If you…
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$10 / User IT Service? The MoviePass Argument
Earlier this week there was a huge announcement made by the company MoviePass. For those unfamiliar with the service, MoviePass offers all-you-can watch movie tickets (with a few stipulations) for one monthly price. It sounds mighty familiar to the MSP’s mantra of “All-you-can-eat” service contracts. However, at the beginning of the week, MoviePass did something…
Why Your Helpdesk Never Seems To Be Able To Catch Up (The Phoenix Project)
From where I come from in the world of consulting, you are either suffering from too much work or too little. As I have worked with MSPs over the last decade, I can say that the same is very true here in IT as well. We often blame our sales efforts for the issue of…
Kaseya Live Connect (KLC) doesn't work after upgrade
After a Kaseya server upgrade, (or often after any upgrade/patch), we get some tickets regarding the inability to access machines via KLC. If you experience this, follow the following steps, and it will generally solve your issue. Make sure the agent has upgraded to the latest version – The Kaseya servers now auto-update agents, however…
Opinion: What To Do With Your MSP When Your Life Falls Apart
The trials of personal life will ebb and flow over time. Most days are pretty normal, but occasionally it seems like the universe conspires against us in the worst ways possible. It could be the loss of a loved one, illness, relationship issues, injury, money problems, children problems, any number of personal events which can…
Giving clients remote access to their systems using Kaseya
Ever have a client that needed emergency or occasional remote access to their system? There really wasn’t much you could do, short of setting up an account for them with a commercial remote control vendor like GoToMyPC, TeamViewer, or LogMeIn. Kaseya has always had a feature that allowed you to grant access to a customer,…
Why Can't MSPs Ever Seem To Sell Cloud Services?
Cloud Services and Managed Services seem like they would be two products that work hand in hand to provide a killer experience to your clients. By coupling cloud and managed services you can cover your client end-to-end from email, document sharing, remote access, and more. More often, though, it seems that, at least from a…
Using Kaseya to Audit for MS17-10 to prevent WannaCrypt infection
Our Service Board and email lit up this weekend with partners asking if they are protected against the WannaCrypt ransomware attack that has made national headlines. First of all, it is important to know that the patch for this (MS17-10) was released back in MARCH, so this is not exactly a NEW vulnerability, but it…
Setting up a Review Gate to create social proof and authority for your MSP.
If you were to look at MSPs (or just small businesses as a whole) you would probably find most lack refinement in terms of customer follow-up, collecting testimonials, and spotting and resolving unhappy clients. It is very easy to move on to the next thing on your agenda at the end of a customer…
When to (NOT) Outsource Your Helpdesk
For those of you who don’t know, we worked as a channel partner with Live Virtual Helpdesk for several years in the past. They are a good helpdesk solution and we still forward partners to them when they’re considering outsourcing or augmenting their internal helpdesk. I still get calls even though we stopped directly offering…
The First Employee Most MSPs Hire and Why it is the Wrong Choice
If you are running a small MSP and are feeling overwhelmed, you are not alone. Most of us get into Managed Services because at some point someone told us that we seemed pretty good at fixing computers and maybe we could make a living doing that. Fixing computers is fun…. Or at least it used…