Supercharge Your Business With Standard Operating Procedures

By The Business Solutions Network

The managed services model is all about efficiency. If you’re currently on a break-fix model or not yet fully embracing services, an important step is going to be getting your business in order. At the recently-held GFI MAX Customer Conference in Orlando, Karl Palachuk, MSP and author, Small Biz Thoughts, talked about how standard operating procedures can help MSPs get organized, save time, and make more money. Here are my notes from his presentation titled “From Process To Profit: Supercharge Your Managed Services With Standard Operating Procedures.”

• Managed services is all about consistency, quality, and repeatability of service and outcomes
• Create checklists for everything to ensure consistency. The last item on every checklist should be to update the checklist (just in case something changed to the process that should be reflected going forward)
• Have a franchise mentality. Franchises standardize on everything to create consistent results at every location. Use that logic in your own business to produce good results.
• There’s lots of new technology coming to market, which can make it difficult for employees to get details right. Checklists and SOPs can ensure you achieve desired outcomes.
• Use tools like PSAs, RMM, ticketing, etc. to automate and keep you on track.
• Manage time every way you can. Track every hour (create internal tickets to account for training, administrative duties, etc.) using your PSA tool.
• Reports can give you great insight into your company’s health. To get good reports, you need to provide good data.
• Define what’s billable and what isn’t. Remove guesswork around situations you will find yourself in (e.g. how do you handle adds, moves, and changes?).
• Take money every way you can (in advance, if possible) — credit cards, ACH, online, paypal, check. Don’t make it difficult to get paid. Also, consider that customers can use a credit card to pay for a cab. They should be able to pay for their IT services the same way.
• Get prepaid for everything and never have a cash flow problem. You are not a bank and if your customers can’t get financing through one, is that the type of customer you want?
• Standardize on your market. Stick to your target market rigidly and don’t deviate. It will allow you to become more efficient.
• “Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it.” — Horace Mann