How Much are Vendors Costing Your MSP?

The rush toward profitability as a new Managed Service Provider (MSP), has many running toward every vendor and solution available to get revenue through the door. While there's nothing wrong with that as a starter strategy, as the years go on, vendor sprawl can stall growth. Today, comprehensive backup solutions are empowering MSPs to both meet a range of client needs, while minimizing operational costs for maximum profits.

Studies show that the top 25% of MSPs – by earnings – are more than 2x as profitable as average MSPs. A deep dive into the foundation of winning MSPs reveal the trick to earning more, is doing less. Basically, you do the opposite of that starter strategy. Instead of adding more backup solutions and vendors to your stack, consolidate and focus on adding value for clients.

Operational costs

The most obvious and most impactful result of downsizing your vendor stack, is the significant cut to operational costs and your total costs of managed services (TCOMS). The more vendors you have, the more management goes into varying processes for onboarding, training, billing, support, restore, storage, unique SLAs, and on and on. Unfortunately, these low-value tasks don't add to your relationship with clients and can hurt retention. The effects of vendor sprawl can be dizzying, so reassess your stack to allocate sources away from managing vendors, and toward profit growth.

Technician expertise

Each backup solution requires its own finesse and as your stack grows, so does the expertise necessary for management. Either technicians need to be ready to handle anything on any solution, or you need more technicians who focus on a specific set of solutions. In order to deliver fast services to clients, especially for business continuity, techs have to know their stuff.

This caliber of employee doesn’t come cheap, so when assessing your stack, consider the overhead you could save with just one or two vendors. Less experienced technicians are still capable of managing business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), so there's no loss on service deliver – but your MSP isn't paying techs to manage a circus. In fact, by focusing your BCDR offering, technicians have the chance to gain a deeper understanding of the solution to accelerate recovery.

Sales and marketing

Marketing can be a sticking point for many MSPs, so why make it harder with more solutions to sell? Trying to be everything to everyone is tempting, but it's not often productive. One of the most important things in sales and marketing is knowing your target client – understanding their business, goals, budget, size, and industry regulations, norms, and expectations. This demands ongoing research, staying up on the latest trends, speaking their language, and then you have the solutions.

Collateral, talk tracks, email messaging, demos, and more, all contribute to selling a solution's features and benefits because they're the best for that business. The matrix of possibilities between potential client, vertical, solution, and vendor are infinite, and that's incredibly overwhelming. It's impossible to market a saturated stack with the attention and information necessary to gain new clients. More likely a scenario is your MSP struggles to meet sales and marketing goals because clients can tell you're overloaded and won't get the tailored services they desire.

Business continuity and disaster recovery

With the launch of Direct-to-Cloud, hardware-free BDR, Axcient makes it possible to service all of your business continuity clients with one vendor – while making it your most profitable offering. x360Recover is the most comprehensive, feature-rich, and easy-to-manage BCDR solution for MSPs.

As a 100% MSP-focused solution provider, Axcient gives MSPs simple, strong, proven solutions that protect clients and build MSPs. See what Axcient can do for your MSP with your Free 14-Day Trial, or one-on-one Product Demo to learn more.

Guest blog courtesy of Axcient. Read more guest blogs from Axcient here.