Growing Your IT Support Business By Becoming A Managed Service Provider

By Debbie Thomson, GFI

If you are reading this, chances are you’re the owner of a small to medium sized business (SMB) quickly reaching the limits of what you can do with your current break/fix model and you are keen to know where you can go from here. That or you’re more than happy with your break/fix business and are curious to know what exactly we think is wrong with it. Either way you’ve come to the right place.

To begin with I’d like to start by making it clear that there isn’t necessarily anything “wrong” with break/fix and to a certain extent the idea of waiting for something to be broken and then fixing it makes perfect sense. For the most part it is easy to sell; if something is broken it needs fixing, it’s that simple. However the problem with break/fix arises when you want to take your SMB, happily working away fixing problems as and when they occur, and make it grow. How exactly do you scale a service that you can’t predict?

The truth of the matter is there is only one way to scale a reactionary business model like this; hiring more staff. You need to do this to ensure you have enough hands on deck if your entire customer base suddenly needs “fixing” at the same time. This in turn leads to larger premises, more visits to site and essentially higher costs. But what if none of your customers need fixing? Then what happens? You need to pay all the staff you have on hand.

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