As you build your business on selling managed services, there are several important decisions that must be made that will affect your organization and its level of profit.
If you are providing managed services to clients, one of your biggest decisions will be whether or not you plan to handle all of the service delivery internally, or outsource some of these responsibilities to a third-party resource. To help make this decision, there are some considerations you will need to evaluate regarding your organization first.
Remaining Flexible to Client Needs
Some of your clients will prefer to only pay for reactive repair work, rather than investing in a proactive maintenance program paid for on a monthly subscription basis. While it is important to understand your clients' needs and make accommodations for them in a way that is effective for both you and your loyal client base, it will be up to you to illustrate the value of proactive maintenance for these clients - at least to the point of convincing them to pay for a low-cost network monitoring, patching and updating "monitoring only" service. This will allow you to provide a basic level of maintenance and help identify potential issues before they become work-stopping outages, while allowing you to bill for any work required beyond the fee you charge for this basic service. In addition, you will discover up-sell opportunities by reviewing your service's monitoring reports.
Reasons To Outsource
If your organization does not have the internal capabilities or resources to dedicate to proactively monitoring, patching and updating your client's networks, you may consider outsourcing this responsibility to another fulfillment partner or vendor - especially if this decision is more cost-effective than providing these services yourself.
Third-Party Outsourcing Considerations
When you are seeking relevant companies to partner with, evaluate your clients' and vertical markets' particular compliance requirements, as these may narrow your choices of fulfillment partners from a geographic perspective, as well as in other areas. While outsourcing service work to countries outside of the United States may be the right cost-effective choice for you than the alternative, in some cases other considerations may apply, and as the global IT outsourcing opportunity grows, U.S.-based organizations are becoming more competitive in this area.
Prepare for Growth
If you want to increase your profit margins, you must be prepared to make difficult decisions that fuel growth in your business while reducing costs. You can achieve this growth by delivering services through your own resources in-house, or by creating a solid working relationship with third-party resources.
Erick Simpson
MSP University
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