A central challenge for any growing MSP is how to efficiently scale your service delivery. Scaling efficiently is difficult because of two conflicting principles:
- Every client is unique and should be served in a manner that is highly tailored to their specific needs.
- If you treat every client engagement as a unique “one-off,” you’ll never achieve any efficiencies of scale.
Growth is thus largely a matter of balancing these two conflicting principles. So the question is “How do I give my clients the individual care they need while optimizing my operational profitability?”
Here are three ideas to consider if you’re in growth mode and asking yourself that central question.
Idea #1: Clients may be different, but their problems are the same.
When it comes to security and compliance, most organizations suffer from the same deficits: weak authentication controls, excessive permissions where they’re not needed, backups that aren’t regularly getting tested under production conditions, etc.
This observation may seem banal—but it’s actually one of the keys to efficient scalability. Because once you understand your clients as unique combinations of common problems, scaling your delivery (as well as your marketing and sales) gets a lot easier. You’re simply mixing-and-matching the elements of a highly standardized toolkit to address each situation as you encounter it.
This strategy of “common standards in customized combinations” is exactly what makes Galactic’s security and compliance resources so useful to you. Sure, you may have one client who is required to comply with HIPAA and another client who is required to comply with PCI and FTC Safeguards. But underlying those three different compliance frameworks is a set of common standards—and, by extension, a set of common policies and controls—that you can mix and match to address those different clients’ needs.
And that mixing and matching is how you give them each what they need without inefficiently treating each of them as a purely unique “one-off.”
Idea #2: Individual attention is as much about the conversation as it is the delivery.
When you serve a client organization, you’re also serving the individual decision-makers who are responsible for your engagement with that client organization. So the way you personalize your communications with those individuals can be as—or even more—important than the extent to which you individualized your service to the organization.
Consider, for example, two organizations that have the exact same needs: your advanced security stack, an incident response plan with tabletop exercises, and quarterly pentesting. But say one is a multi-location law practice while the other is a multi-location outpatient surgery center. Yes, from a technical perspective, you may be doing the exact same thing for both. However, you wouldn’t speak to them in the same way.
The law firm will be concerned with issues such as protection of client confidentiality and avoiding potentially serious damage to the firm’s reputation. The surgery center will likely think more in terms of HIPAA compliance and the impact of downtime. The technology you’re deploying for them may be similar—but the business benefits you’re delivering are quite different.
Think of it this way: It would make you very nervous if your doctor told you that you have symptoms they’ve never seen before—and that they have to formulate an entirely new medication and/or invent a whole new kind of surgery to treat you. On the contrary, you want the reassurance of knowing they’ve seen your symptoms before and that they know how to treat you.
On the other hand, you also want them to treat you as an individual. You want to know that they’re taking into account your age, your current physical condition, and other personal factors.
MSP clients are the same way. They want to be spoken to as individuals. But they also need to know that you’re familiar with companies that face similar challenges—and that you’ve addressed those similar challenges many times before with great success.
Idea #3: Initiate every engagement with an assessment of the client’s individual characteristics
Most MSPs have historically tried to get engaged with a prospect first—and then done their fact-finding about what makes that prospect unique.
This process is exactly backwards. The first thing a doctor does is examine you. The first thing a broker does is look at your portfolio. Sure, they may ask you a few questions in order to get your perspective about where you’re at. But, as professionals, they want to get the facts in their hands first.
MSPs that want to treat prospects appropriately as individuals while achieving optimum profitability should adopt the same approach. Do a pentest first to get the facts about your prospects. And keep doing those pentests quarterly to keep getting the facts about the prospects you’ve turned into clients.
That way, both you and your clients will know you’re not treating them like anybody else. Your recommendations and actions are based on your direct findings regarding their individual case. You can then address those specific, individualized findings by mapping them to a standardized set of solutions.
And that’s how you treat every client as unique while also ensuring that your solutions are resource-efficient at scale.
To learn more about how Galactic can help you efficiently grow your business, schedule yourself for a 56-minute orientation session here—or give us a call at 800-837-1239.
