There’s two resources I’m continually recommending to people I know and business owners I work with, that everyone seems to get enormous value from. I reread these two at least once a year and find they help me break out of bad habits I’ve inadvertently slipped into and retrain my focus.

I’d confidently say almost all MSPs are in the game because they want to make more money, do less work and have happier clients – building a business on a dollars per hour basis is a one way street to long hours, diminishing returns and no life. Most employees want to get more done, look good to their boss, work less stop working overtime and deal with less client emergencies.

These two are dirt cheap and well worth the small investment of time & money, regardless of whether you’re an employee or are running an Managed Services Provider business.

1. The Four Hour Work Week

Now don’t be put off by the title or what you may or may not have heard about this book, the title is mostly to attract attention. The Four Hour Work Week is less about working four hours a week and more about getting more done with less time.

Some of the key things you’ll learn from the book are:

• How to write better and more effective emails that save you massive amounts of time & dramatically reduce inbox clutter
  Most people write crappy emails which then require more clarification and a whole bunch of back and forth before the intended result is achieved. Ultimately, this means more inbox clutter and time wasting. The techniques is this book around writing more effective emails has saved me hours each week and made the 20 bucks I spent on the book worthwhile by itself alone.
• How to identify time wasting & non-productive activities, minimize or eliminate them ultimately spending less time at the office
  Again, I used to find myself burning hours every day screwing around doing unimportant tasks. I’ve a huge tendency to get distracted when I have a heavy workload day and am sitting in front of the PC for 10+ hours. Some of the strategies Ferriss suggests really do help realign your focus and eliminate a lot of time wasting which helps me cut my screen time down by hours every week.
• How to identify time consuming clients, non-ideal customers and non-profitable accounts along with some strategies to minimize their negative impact
  The change in perspective I got from this part of the was was huge for me. As a business owner quite often you end up taking a client because of the additional revenue they’ll bring in and then they turn out to be a nightmare client. Particularly for MSPs, who are often working on a fixed-fee basis, a time consuming client can quickly become unprofitable. The concept of the “ideal customer” is not new but Ferriss has a different approach I haven’t seen before.

The book is on sale at Amazon at the moment for less than $12 – definitely worth the 12 bucks so go and grab a copy. There’s also an audiobook available if you don’t have the time to consume a whole book.

There’s also a whole bunch of good productivity stuff at the blog for the book, particularly a lot of the older posts which are worth a look.

I’ve you’ve read the book, I’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section.

Link: The Four Hour Work Week on Amazon.com

2. Sourcecontrol by David Walsh

You’ve probably noticed the links in the sidebar to this one and I’ve written about this one before. This is an E-book – don’t be put off by this. The book is positioned as a guide to successful outsourcing and was inspired by The Four Hour Workweek. Although the book is focussed on successful outsourcing I found that its actually a great guide to using your own staff more effectively and working better with remote staff & remote teams.

A lot of MSPs & managers I’ve worked with are terrible at delegating tasks and building and working with process. They’re particularly rubbish at this when working remotely. This book provides a great framework for more effective delegation & management of staff, particularly staff who are working remotely or who you don’t see in person often – perfect for MSPs who may have staff located remotely, working from client sites or working from home.

I’ve done quite a bit of work with Kaseya’s NOC and Zenith’s NOC over the past 12-18 months and some of the things I’ve learnt from this book have saved me a lot of time and headaches.

The book is about 160 pages long all up with a bunch of additional guides & templates, you can grab the first 30 pages free and read more about it at getsourcecontrol.com

Link: Source Control by David Walsh

More Resources & Juicy Stuff

This blog didn’t get much attention in the last 12 months and I haven’t written much about Kaseya lately. I’m planning on mixing things up a bit in 2011 and sharing a lot of tools & resources I’ve been sitting on so watch out for that. I’ll also be adding a Resources page which I’ll be using as the index for all the stuff I share along with an Archives page so you can dig through some of the old stuff on the site so watch out for that.

Any juicy resources you’ve found? Feel free to share in the comments!

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If you’ve read my “About” page on the site you’ll know in a former life I ran an online retail store. That business grew extremely rapidly through leveraging online marketing techniques, primarily SEO & old school social media. I now do ongoing consulting for a handful of online retail stores helping them with building their businesses online.

How-to Marketing stuff for MSPs

After reading Mike Cooch’s latest blog post he does paint a pretty clear picture of how badly MSPs market and sell themselves. While there’s plenty of technology to help MSPs do business better there’s only a handful of people that MSPs can turn to for marketing and sales advice. If you don’t know the big ones, I’ve listed them below (please add any I’ve missed to the comments and I’ll update this post):

Gary Pica

Robin Robins

Kutenda

Stuart Selbst

I figure that I might as well pitch in and share the love so over the next few months I’m going to rollout some posts around online marketing and see how they’re received – I think the guys above have the strategy stuff pretty well covered so I’m going to share some tactics, more “What To Do” and “How To Do it” around online marketing. Some of it is common-sense mainstream online marketing stuff, some of it you’ll only know about if you’re heavily in the online marketing space, either way, looking at some of the MSP websites in the MSPMentor top 100 list, most MSPs have implemented neither.

Brightgauge.com – an up & coming tool to keep an eye on

I tweeted this out the other day, if you missed it then this is one to keep an eye on, particularly for newer MSPs who are still feeling their way around Kaseya’s reporting engine.

Check out www.brightgauge.com which is scheduled to launch in Jan 2011

Basically, its a dashboard and reporting tool that sits over the top of Kaseya & Connectwise…like they say in their website copy, this could be an invaluable sales tool!

Kaseya2 upgrade – time to upgrade now

I’ve had a lot of emails come through this month about Kaseya 2, is it any good? should I upgrade? what should I watch out for? – I figure that everyone has been working through their todo lists in the leadup to Thanksgiving and looking to get some of the bigger action items ticked off the list.

The quick answer is upgrade now!

My experience now is that K2 is as stable as its ever going to be and the scheduling engine and some of the improvements now make this a really worthwhile upgrade. Kaseya has done a good job ironing out the bugs and apart from general support stuff, I haven’t really seen any major issues for a few months now.

The new 6.1 version of the VSA is also due out soon and the improvements scheduled for the new .1 upgrade will leave MSPs who’ve haven’t upgraded at a disadvantage. I’m sure 6.1 is going to have some bugs so if you haven’t bitten the bullet and moved to K2 I say do it now, iron out the bugs over the holiday period when things should be fairly quiet and then look at the 6.1 upgrade towards end of Q1 next year.

If you have an K2 upgrade feedback, please share in the comments!

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While you’re there, you should also have out David Walsh’s ebook, Source Control. As David says, “if you’re not outsourcing, you’re either about to get crushed by someone who is, or wasting time on worthless tasks.”

Nowhere in my mind is this more true than in the MSP market where we’re now at MSP 2.0. Everybody is using the same tools and price is now becoming a differentiator – ultimately, cost pressures are going to go up and outsourcing the routine, mundane, boring and specialized tasks is a smart way to cut costs. Outsourcing is hard, but David’s book really helps simplify the process.

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I’m really excited about the new iPad revealed last week. In fact, I’m really excited about Apple in general at the moment. A month ago I made the switch to a Macbook Pro fulltime because I’ve simply had enough of Windows. Win7 is simply too little too late. The elegancy and performance of Mac OS wins hands down every time. I love my new MBP…its just ridiculously fast compared to my old Windows notebook.

A growing trend towards Apple hardware in the SMB/SME space…

Talking with a few different clients over the past fews months, I’ve noticed a new trend occurring. CEO & Exec level staff at companies they support are heavily leaning towards iPhone and ditching their old Blackberry handsets. A lot of these guys have also ditched their Windows notebooks in favour of a Macbook (granted a lot are still running Windows on top of Parallels or VMware). Staff working for these MSPs seem to be moving towards Apple too opting to use their own personal MBPs at work too.

So here’s the thing, 2-3 years ago, many MSPs wouldn’t have even thought of supporting Apple machines or equipment. 18 months ago – many were forced into a position where they had to. Sure, the majority of machines on networks they managed were Windows boxes with a couple of Macs so not a big deal. Today, if the CEO of a SME business you support is ditching his beloved Blackberry and Windows notebook for an iPhone and Macbook Pro, you can be certain than 18 months down the track, he’ll be much more inclined to look at rolling out more Apple machines in that business.

MSPMentor could only find 1 Mac MSP firm?

So here’s the opportunity that I don’t think anyone in the MSP sector is really leveraging except maybe for these guys: MSPMentor.net found an Apple friendly MSP firm
Build some internal capability to support Mac machines and start promoting yourself as a capable Apple & Mac support provider.

At a time when the MSP market is becoming heavily commoditized, you need something to help you stand out from the rest and here is something that’s really simple. A lot of MSPs shun Macs because they don’t need much (any?) maintenance, rarely need patches and simply just work. The reality is, users need support regardless of what machine they’re running. The fact that Macs need significantly less maintenance than a Windows box is even more reason why you should be pushing into this vertical market.

Would love to hear your take on supporting Macs….post in the comments.

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If you’re looking to improve your marketing and sales efforts you should check them both out at the links below or in the Kaseya Resources section in the sidebar.

From Gary’s site:
FormulaWon gives you the tools you need to take your business to the next level. It covers leadership; packaging, pricing and delivery; sales; and performance tracking because those are the 4 key factors that make the difference between the MSPs that make it and those that don’t.
Gary Pica – TruMethods.com

From Robin Robins site:
“My Technology Marketing Toolkit Takes the Mystery and Hard Work Out of Marketing Your Business, Attracting New Clients, and Selling Profitable Managed Services Contracts”
Robin Robins – TechnologyMarketingToolkit.com

Any other good MSP business or marketing resources out there? Drop me a line in the comments and let me know!

EDIT: as commented by Brendan Cosgrove, Stuart Selbst also does some great work coaching MSPs towards profitability and success!

http://www.stuartselbst.com/

Excerpt from his site:

Stuart now owns Stuart Selbst Consulting, a consulting firm which offers an executive coaching along with other business development programs that align sales and marketing together with business processes along with the practice of goal setting to achieve individual and team success.

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Quality ALWAYS costs less in the long run

Yes you can make short term profit gains or cost reduction by dropping quality, but ultimately, over a longer term, reduced quality will cost you time, clients, reputation, loyalty and many other intagibles that ultimately have a negative effect on your bottom line.

Where’s your business focus? On the quality of your output or on the cost of producing that output?

I strongly believe that what you focus on is what you get – instead of focussing on worrying about costs, constantly trying to reduce expenses & overhead and trying to weasel every last dollar out of your client base, focus on doing quality work, providing quality service and a quality experience. I guarantee it will pay off over the long term.

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