8 Ways MSPs Increase Profits by Eliminating Unplanned Work

As you manage your MSP business, it’s vital to minimize unplanned and unexpected work, especially if they result in unpaid work.

You can’t price your services profitably unless you can confidently estimate the staff resources required to meet your contracted obligations. Any unexpected client work directly impacts your bottom line for the worse.

So, how do you protect your business from hidden gotchas or last-minute snafus?

Here are eight steps most often cited by highly profitable MSPs:

1. Full up-front network discovery and audit: There are many ways for your team to be hit with unexpected work: different assumptions on which servers are included in the service plan; divergent expectations on whether mobile devices are covered (and, if so, which devices and what ‘covered’ means); misunderstandings on what equipment is under warranty. So, start out on the right foot, with all infrastructure under service – including OS, hardware configurations, versioning, and patch history – fully audited and verified with the client.
2. Continual network discovery processes: You need to continually keep up with your clients’ changing infrastructure and network landscape. A client may spin up a workstation for a special project out of the scope of the contract and forget to tell you. But without an up-to-date picture of their infrastructure, how will your helpdesk staff know this? They won’t ―so you end up providing support that’s not covered in the SOW or in your staff allocation plans.
3. Standardization: Insist on standardized device configurations (including the actual devices) and software sets. These are much easier to manage, troubleshoot and rebuild when issues do occur. While you’re at it, mandate standardized policies and processes for software updates and downloads. If the client resists standardization, or refuses to replace hardware that’s out of warranty, you can still support them, of course. However, you should raise your pricing for non-standard configurations to accurately reflect the extra staff time it will take to support these devices and configurations