As a Managed Service Provider, you’re keen to grow. But how do you do that in a market full of tech changes and rising customer demands? The answer might lie in something that sounds boring at first – but works! – namely standardization.
In over 200 chats with MSPs over the past 7 years, we’ve uncovered 7 general principles that successful MSPs swear by. These principles help you as an MSP to quickly adapt to the changing tech landscape. By consistently applying these, you’re not just getting better results for your clients, but you’re also beefing up your market position.
In our previous blogs, we’ve already covered the principles: a clear proposition, the right tools for your team, challenging your customer, and seeing the bigger picture. In this blog, we’ll show you how standardization – the fifth principle – helps in your development as an MSP.
The Chaos of Custom Work
Imagine you have 50 clients and you do things slightly differently for each one. That means 50 different ways to create a new user, 50 different security settings, and 50 different reports. A real nightmare for your team and a guarantee for errors and inefficiency.
Sadly, this scenario is the daily reality for many MSPs. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By standardizing, you can tame this chaos and inefficiency. Here are 4 tips to standardize and how they help you grow.
Be Predictable
Predictability is the foundation of trust. As an MSP, you want your clients to know what they can expect from you. Standardization helps you deliver consistent, reliable service. Whether it’s response times, problem-solving, or reporting – with standardized processes, you know exactly what you can promise and deliver.
Moreover, predictability makes your work more efficient. Your team doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time, but can fall back on proven methods. This leads to faster service and fewer mistakes.
Every Exception Has an Impact
It’s tempting to do things slightly differently for each client. A special report here, a customized setting there. But every exception impacts your entire organization. It requires extra time from your employees, increases the chance of errors, and makes it harder to train new people.
By minimizing exceptions, you create a streamlined organization that can work more effectively and efficiently. You can better deploy your resources and scale up your services without needing proportionally more staff.
Stay in Control
With standardized processes, you have more control over your service delivery. You can more easily monitor, measure, and improve. Think about your team’s performance, customer satisfaction, or the efficiency of your processes; with standardization, you have a clear picture of what’s happening and what you can still improve.
This control isn’t just important internally. It also allows you to better meet compliance requirements and give your customers better insight into the services you provide.
‘As-is’ Environments Are Time-Consuming
Managing ‘as-is’ environments, where each client has their own unique setup, is like maintaining a garden full of exotic plants – each needs its own specific care. It takes an enormous amount of time and makes it difficult to work efficiently.
By standardizing, you turn that exotic garden into a well-designed park: efficient to maintain and still beautiful for everyone. You can solve problems faster, roll out updates, and implement new functionalities
Standardization as a Basis for Growth
So standardization gives you opportunities to grow more efficiently. However, standardization isn’t the end point, but just the beginning. It’s the foundation on which you can build to take new steps in your business. With standardized processes, you can more easily implement new technologies, develop new services, and deploy your team more effectively.
Moreover, standardization makes it possible to continuously improve your service delivery. It gives you the space to focus on innovation and value creation for your customers, instead of constantly lagging behind and putting out fires.
Getting Started with Standardization
Standardization is an important step if you want to grow as an MSP. It allows you to work more efficiently, deliver consistent quality, and be ready for future challenges.
Start small, choose one process to standardize and build from there. Involve your team in the process and clearly communicate about the benefits, both internally and to your customers.
Want to brainstorm about how you can implement standardization in your MSP? We’d love to think along with you! Feel free to get in touch with us for a no-obligation chat. We can help you draw up a plan that fits your specific situation and goals.
And if you want more tips on how to grow as an MSP, keep an eye on us, because more blogs are coming about the other principles of the Ydentic MSP framework. This way, we’ll help you step by step on your way to a successful, future-proof MSP.
