How to Scale/Streamline Your MSP Business

As a Managed Services Provider (MSP) business owner, you’ve likely been working hard to get your business off the ground for a while now and are looking at how to scale your MSP business.

However, to scale can mean different things for different businesses, and while making more money might be a main goal, it’s important to understand what exactly scaling means to you before you begin. In addition to this, scaling doesn’t just happen overnight, and processes in the business need to be streamlined for more effective growth to take place.

5 Tips on How to Scale Your MSP Business #

1. Solidify All Current Processes
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If you’re in the growth stage of your business, you’ve no doubt created some effective processes that have helped you build the business to this point. If you’re still a relatively small business, now is the time to hone your current sales, marketing, administrative and other procedures, as it's important to have a concrete foundation before you can understand how to scale your MSP business.

At this point, since you’re already managing clients, it’s important to take inventory of the processes that work and don’t work with your current clients. This is especially important as it will allow you to still focus on servicing your existing clients effectively while taking on more.

2. Create an Accessible Knowledge Resource
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Once you’ve nailed down your processes, and written them out step by step, it’s essential to make these available to all of your employees- current and future. While you might feel like many of the processes you document are common sense, you’d be surprised how much frustration can be caused by new or existing employees not understanding or following even the most basic protocol, especially when it comes to dealing with clients.

When understanding how to scale your MSP business, there are many ways to share this information, whether it’s through a shared server or other commercially available means. All that matters is that the information is concise and accessible and that there is always someone, like a manager, to help anyone who doesn’t understand what they are doing.

If you want to double check how competitors do it you can check out out MSP onboarding checklist or ask them directly through one of the many MSP forums available out there.

3. Set Specific And Measurable Goals
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While scaling and growing a business might be every small to medium business owner’s dream, what exactly are you looking to achieve? For example, are you looking to make a certain amount of turnover every year or increase your customer base for greater impact and brand equity in the marketplace?

Whatever your goals are, it’s important to note them down and discuss these with your team so that you are all on the same page before you start to expand your existing services.

This will also help you to understand what you are looking for when hiring new staff.

5. Understand What You Need In Order To Scale
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Scaling could very well mean more clients and additional revenue to you and your business, but what does that really look like on a practical level? This might mean hiring more staff to take on administrative roles and perhaps even moving to a larger premises.

It could also mean allowing for some extra expenditure as you test things out, as unfortunately, scaling doesn’t always go to plan and there might be some points of contact you miss along the way.

4. Ensure As Much Predictability As Possible
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Once you start to scale, it can be difficult to halt the momentum and go back and refine processes on the fly. So, before you even start to take on more clients or hire more staff, it’s important to streamline as many workflows as possible. In addition to this, automate them wherever you can. This will help when employees are busy and don’t have time to focus on the details.

When it comes to financial predictability, it’s also essential to have a solid financial plan in place to make sure that expenses can be covered.

Final Thoughts On How To Scale Your MSP Business #

Scaling and streaming your MSP business can be an exciting and lucrative endeavor, but only if you approach it with both enthusiasm and practicality. As we’ve mentioned before, scaling also doesn’t happen overnight, and in fact, you might not really want it to, as many unexpected challenges can come with expanding a business.

With the tips above, you’re sure to lay a solid foundation for scaling and growing your MSP business. In fact, with all of the groundwork covered, you’ll be able to delegate tasks more effectively and be able to focus on sealing more deals to grow the business, without having to worry about whether the details are being taken care of.

In case you found this guide interesting, we have create other MSP content that you could use to set up your digital marketing channels, such as SEO and Paid Search Campaigns!