Our clients all invest in IT because they have a job they need to do, and IT can help them do it more accurately and more quickly.
As MSPs, we should spend time working with our clients, applying our knowledge and helping them do things smarter.
When I was a teenager, my father was a building contractor. He used to set up foundations for pole homes and every time he’d win a new contract, he would spend a day manually working out how much concrete was needed for all the poles in a project. His table would be strewn with graph paper, hand written calculations and no small amount of cursing as he realised the need to rework sections.
Back in those days, we had the very first programmable calculators – in fact we still have one of these old Casio FX devices for nostalgia – and it was a simple task for me to create a programme that worked this out for him in minutes – turning a day of work into half an hour. That’s when I realised that IT was the answer to saving people time, and increasing productivity,
It we are just making the IT more reliable, and more secure, then we are only doing part of the job. We see ourselves as our client’s trusted advisor, but do they see us that way, or are we just the technicians to that support what they are doing now?
The opportunity we have is to help our client to USE their IT to achieve their goals. Not just reliable IT with great service, but to achieve what really matters to them – their budget for the quarter or the year, to help them bring their new product or service to market, to reduce key business risks or reduce costs.
Most MSPs will struggle with this. Maybe the principal can do this work, but they are limited to who else they can ask to do this work in their business. Having spent years streamlining services, creating a unique standard set and building efficiency, how can they create the same processes for consulting?
MSPs need a standard way of doing this work. For IT support, they start with a technical audit. Now they need a standard way of doing a business IT review – we call that a discovery. Then they need a standard way of managing their client’s IT, not just IT as an MSP defines it, but IT as the client defines it. That’s all software, from the big line-of-business software to the smaller productivity apps. It is considering the disparate data collected and creating insights from it. It’s thinking about policy and procedures to meet the expectations of boards. Or considering the people that work in IT, and how to support them, and most importantly the entire business and all the people that use IT to get their work done each day – what do they need, what automation can help them, what business processes do they do that are repetitive? What work is cumbersome or error prone and is there a better way?
That’s why we built GetKambium. To make IT strategy easier.
“Discover” identifies this and “Manage” creates a programme to undertake it. What actions need to be done each week, month, or quarter? What needs to be reviewed every year? Where are the templates to make this easy to repeat, and how can you schedule it so that it gets done proactively?