How to Grow Your MSP Business in Any Market

Maybe you’ve hit a ceiling and are experiencing stagnant revenue growth, or you want to rapidly grow your MSP business to sell or exit and command a higher valuation. If you’re thinking about growth, you’ve come to the right place.

When you’re working in your business day-to-day, it can be difficult to find the bandwidth to work “on the business”. Many business owners think sales and marketing are the answer, so they ramp up efforts quickly, only to be disappointed when they lose current clients through a leaky bucket. Adding capacity as you scale up can be tricky for an MSP business, sometimes requiring capital and extra resources.

The truth is, if you’re not growing your business, you’re falling behind. Here are 16 strategies that our team at C4 Solutions has put together to make sure you keep moving forward.

1. Adopt a Mindset for Growth

Before we take on any new partners at C4 Solutions, we look at this first. Does this client have the right mindset to grow? Growth requires taking a risk, and that requires owners that are open-minded, vulnerable, and willing to take imperfect action. You must be prepared to pivot with market opportunities and threats. Growth also requires good people. If you have the mindset that you can do it all alone, you won’t get far. A team mindset is essential to leading your company towards bigger goals.

2. Create Your Vision

Growth needs vision before action. This will help you make better decisions about everything in your business: people, processes, strategies, customers, and finances. It will also help you bring on better clients with less hassle and more profit. It is important to document this vision for your company and share it with everyone on your team. Here are questions to think about when creating your vision:

What are your core values as a company? These should be the north star of your company.

What is your unique selling point?

Are there products/services that you offer that don’t fit your vision? Are there customers or employees that don’t fit this?

What do you want your culture to be like?

3. Empower and Incentivize Your Leaders

After creating your vision, get your leaders aligned. Incentivizing them is important to keep everyone moving in the same direction. How will you reward them as the company reaches certain milestones? If your people don’t deliver, you won’t get results. If you want to one day, be able to exit your business, it must be able to run without you. It is your job to create clarity and guidelines to support your people in carrying out your vision. The right metrics will keep people accountable and support your team working towards growth goals. We like to see everyone be accountable for at least one number.

Are your leaders in the right seats at your company?

Do they have well-defined roles and are they motivated?

4. Start with a Baseline- Audit

Starting with an audit of your business will help establish a baseline and define the gaps. Then, you can see where to build capacity. Audit your processes and procedures from financials, marketing, sales, and service delivery. Do a SWOT analysis and see where you stack up against your competitors and industry.

5. Know Your Metrics

After an audit, you should have gathered a lot of data and important metrics. Some of these baseline metrics are:

• Profit Margin and EBITDA

• Cash Flow

• Revenue Growth Rate

• Customer Satisfaction

• Employee Satisfaction

• Customer Retention Rate

• Employee Utilization Rates

• Customer Acquisition Cost

• Customer Lifetime Value

• New Leads

• Revenue in the Pipeline

• Closed Revenue

Without data, you will be attempting to scale your MSP business blindly. Knowing your metrics and comparing them to your goals, will help you take more strategic and effective action. After this process, you should be aware of your strengths and where you need to build on your weaknesses. Use this data to create a scorecard for your business, where you will track the most important metrics for operating and running your business. Add that to your daily dashboard. Make sure you know who is accountable for each metric.

6. Document/Streamline Your Processes and Procedures

Create a blueprint for running your business and train your people to follow it. You should develop SOPs. Getting this in place now will help you later if you want to sell your business and maximize your MSP valuation.

7. Create a Plan

“A vision, without a plan, is merely hallucination” (Will Rogers). After deciding on your vision, finding your metrics, and documenting your processes, you should create a strategic plan. This will help you refine your focus, get rid of the noise, and set measurable goals. At this point, you may consider bringing in professionals to help you build a 3 or 5-Year Strategic Growth Plan for your MSP.

8. Find the Low Hanging Fruit

Next, look to see if you’re fully exploiting your current resources. Where can you get traction the quickest?

There are several levers that you can pull to scale your MSP without a lot of effort.

• Raising prices
• Selling existing clients more services
• Cutting back on expenses
• Offering better payment terms
• Incentivizing current customers to make referrals
• Optimizing sales processes to close more business

9. Manage Your Cash Flow

Alan Miltz says, “Run out of cash, and it’s game over”. We couldn’t agree more. Sometimes taking the right capital at the right time in your growth curve is essential. Having cash on hand can allow you to take advantage of opportunities as they come up, like acquiring another company or labor costs to take on larger clients.

10. Partner with the Right People

The right strategic relationship can offer huge dividends for your own business. The most important question to ask here is, “Who has your same customers?” How can you partner and grow together? This is the foundation of ecosystem selling, something that our team specializes in. Often, when you’re trying to solve a business problem, you find other problems that need to be solved. This is where partners can come in. Figure out a profitable way to go to market together and everyone grows. Basically, make your MSP the sandbox that everyone wants to play in.

11. Automate

A lot of MSP business processes can be automated or delegated freeing you up to focus on the more high-touch areas of customer experience and strategic planning, as well as saving you money on labor. This will help you do more with less as you scale your MSP business. Areas you should be automating some tasks include:

• Accounting/Billing
• Marketing
• Onboarding
• Service Delivery
• Operations

12. Grow Your MSP Business Through Acquisition

Sometimes the easiest way to grow your own EBITDA, is to acquire another company. Knowing the right targets and synergies that will complement your own MSP business is key. Consider bringing on an advisor to help you with this process. Beware of brokers though, as they may not have your best interest in mind.

13. Create a Marketing Plan

If you want to increase your sales, you need to increase your opportunities. Create a marketing strategy for your MSP to get more leads to grow sales. You should be generating leads from people who are ready to buy now as well as filling your funnel with people who might be ready to buy later.

While there are many marketing strategies out there, copying your competition or a big MSP that you see should not be one of them. The best strategy is tailored to your business goals, budget, and resources. The way B2B buyers are buying is shifting. Being where they are at the right time with the right messaging sometimes requires an omnichannel approach. Your marketing plan should include strategies and tactics for different points in the buying journey. A fractional CMO can help to oversee marketing strategy without having to hire a full-time marketing person.

For marketing, it is also important to consider where you currently have influence. How can you use that to help you win more business?

14. Create a Sales Process/Playbook and Train Your Team

Nothing happens until a sale is made. If you’re responsible for sales at your MSP, it might be time to create a sales process and playbook and train a new team member. Bringing in a vCRO can help you develop and implement a strong sales framework.

15. Leverage New Tech

If you haven’t thought about what’s next, you will soon be irrelevant. Technology is changing quickly. The successful MSPs are staying up to date with solving current business challenges. IoT applications that solve critical business problems are becoming more mainstream. Virtual workplaces will soon include VR/AR and AI. Have you thought about managed services around these new opportunities? Have you looked at how to manage the networks of the future?

16. Don’t Have a Leaky Bucket

What point is growth for your MSP business if you’re losing clients on the back end? Keeping service delivery excellent and continuing to add value to existing clients is paramount. Make sure your customers are realizing the full value of their spend with you by communicating and nurturing those existing relationships.

As you know, a lot of these MSP growth strategies are easier said than done. Our team at C4 Solutions can help you execute your strategic plan with custom solutions and fractional experts. By partnering with a team to help you grow your business, you’ll get industry pros who’ve been in your shoes and know your challenges. See how we can help you achieve hyper-growth for your MSP business by getting a free assessment.

Written by Holly Mack