THE BIGGEST THREAT to your MSP business this year is not the pandemic or the yo-yo economy. It’s certainly not Microsoft, HP, or Dell going direct to your clients. And it’s most definitely not your competition.
Nope, the biggest threat for your MSP in 2021 is …. distraction.
Distraction from new vendors or products. Distraction from your team. Distraction that you subconsciously create to avoid working on the tougher, more challenging, highest ROI tasks in your business.
Distraction is the biggest killer to building a sustainable and strong business. Unfortunately, our industry, by its very technological nature, is ravaged by this curse of distraction.
The cure, of course, is focus. Smart MSPs—and by extension, the most successful—keep themselves and their team focused on important things.
A Widening Gap
Distraction is an even bigger threat than normal this year because the rapidly shifting MSP industry went into overdrive in 2020. Help desk, project work, and service desk operations are quickly commoditizing. As part of that industry shift, a gap is emerging and (more importantly) widening.
On one side are the smart MSPs who are doubling down and focusing on intentional growth and rapid business improvement. They’re kicking complacency and distraction to the curb.
On the other side are the complacent, unfocused MSPs who have been taking things easy, riding the tailwind of the last 10 years’ bull economy and the recent artificial stimulus packages.
The problem is that the longer the smart MSPs work on improving things, the bigger the gap is becoming between them and the complacent MSPs.
Smart MSPs are finding it easier and easier to take clients and staff from complacent MSPs. This is throwing complacent MSPs into a slow, spiraling, painful business death.
If you’re on the complacent side, it’s not too late to change sides, but you have to act now!
Stop This, Start That
Here’s what smart MSPs aren’t doing:
- They aren’t using social media (or they’re using it very rarely).
- They aren’t changing their PSA, RMM, and AV every six months.
- They aren’t checking email, Teams, and Slack all day (they batch process once or twice a day).
- They aren’t getting distracted by all the shiny red objects our industry is continually serving up.
- They aren’t letting urgent tasks get in the way of important tasks (check out 7 Habits‘ Stephen Covey’s Priority Matrix for what I’m talking about here).
- They aren’t letting distractions take them away from focusing on their mission!
And here’s what smart MSPs are doing in 2021:
- They’re building their marketing engine (Hint: Learning how to do good marketing is just acquiring another skill, just like learning how to set up an Azure Active Directory).
- They’re crafting memorable, fun, personal experiences for their clients that create conversations (an amazing customer experience is a differentiator).
- They’re learning how to have better business-level conversations with their clients about things like risk, ROI, and efficiency rather than technical-level conversations around things like AV, backups, and patching.
- They’re improving their own leadership and sales skills (two highly underrated yet horribly underserved skills in our industry).
- They’re creating intentional time every single week to work ON their business (you’ve heard this one a million times, but are you actually doing it?).
- They’re running their business with a business operating system (the EOS model from Gino Wickman or the Rockefeller Habits model from Verne Harnish are great examples)
So if you want to stay on the “”smart”” side of the widening gap, now’s the time to focus. Forget about the pandemic (unnecessary worry won’t solve anything). Forget about the economy (you can’t control it anyway). And forget about your competition, because your only real competition is the unfocused version of yourself.
NIGEL MOORE is a former MSP owner and founder of The Tech Tribe, a global program and community for MSPs. He is also the author of two books: Package Price Profit and Survive and Thrive.
