The new Steve Jobs biography has a lot of interesting anecdotes, quotes, and business philosophy ideas. What else would you expect from someone like Steve Jobs. What you don't necessarily expect is to get business advice that is very practical to a professional services firm, like a MSP. After all, Apple is the opposite of a professional services company; they make and sell great products.
Jobs' philosophy, one of his many, on why companies succeed (and fail) has to do with value and innovation. These are simple enough to understand but what he meant was companies must be innovators and develop good products/services. The day a company ceases to innovate and focus its attention on the products/services it delivers it will begin its decline. Specifically, Jobs calls attention to the behavior of companies who cease the innovation process and instead focus on cost savings and sales. When this happens, the attention, focus, and resources of the company are no longer addressing what made the company successful, but are now primarily attuned to reducing costs, sales, and squeezing money out of the organization. In this regard, the company is playing defense.
MSPs are all about the customer experience. MSPs deliver professional services and the fundamental value a MSP has to offer rests with the technicians, engineers, and service staff who participate in the complex dance that we call IT service delivery. When a MSP stops innovating and focusing their efforts on service delivery and instead spend their time selling and minimizing cost, the MSP has taken a defensive posture.
Now, at first glance, selling and reducing costs may not seem like a bad thing at all. Some of you may even be thinking that there is nothing wrong with putting resources behind sales. Some may think it is wise to constantly be looking at ways to reduce costs. Let me be clear, I don't think there is anything wrong with either of these things. I'd probably wager that Steve Jobs didn't think there is anything wrong with these things either. However, while minimizing waste and marketing and sales are important to any company, if the attention is not on innovation and service delivery (speaking of MSPs), the company is no longer on the offense. In this scenario, playing offense means continuously advancing the products and services the company creates, while simultaneously proving the value of the company to the customer. This very strategy was put into action during the last decade of Steve Jobs' tenure with Apple. As a result of this continuos offensive strategy, the company innovated and became one of the most valuable companies on the face of the planet.
