Articles by David Weeks

1. How To Make The Move And Be A Successful MSP 5/10/2016

   A hardware-centric focus isn’t going to grow your business fast or make it last for decades. The profit margins are thin and the business of “reselling” is old school. The real opportunity for channel partners is around professional services and managed solutions.

2. 3 Ways A Managed Services Mindset Can Boost Your Bottom Line 3/22/2016

   By now, you have probably thought about what you need to move your business toward a managed services model. Maybe you are already on your way or know it’s something you need to get going on, but aren’t sure how to start. To begin your journey, you must first adopt the mantra of: “think like a consultant, deliver like a tech.” Remember moving to a managed services mindset doesn’t mean you have to give up troubleshooting and upgrading new equipment for your clients; in fact it is actually vital to keeping your clients happy on a long-term basis! 

3. What IT Service Providers Need To Know About À La Carte Pricing 12/17/2015

   With more servers and networks moving into the cloud — where automation reigns supreme — manual maintenance is becoming a thing of the past. As traditional IT infrastructure goes virtual, the big question many IT services firms and managed service providers (MSPs) are asking is, what’s left to be managed?

4. 4 Ways To Move Outside Your Comfort Zone And Win Big With Managed Services 8/11/2015

   The comfort zone for many channel partners revolves around their technology expertise. How many certs, how many vendors, how many techs? But where the big money is being made is in the application of this knowledge and the solutions it can create to solve business problems and deliver desired outcomes for businesses of all sizes.

5. Use Automation To Address These Common Help Desk Complaints 5/1/2015

   Whether you are an in-house IT pro or an MSP delivering help-desk services to clients, you invariably experience the same litany of help-desk complaints day in and day out. And with so many similar trouble tickets popping up every day, it simply doesn’t make sense to apply time-consuming manual approaches to resolution to every one of them. Instead, you can add profit to your business and best practices to your help desk with automation.

6. Patch Management As A Path To Recurring Revenue Growth For MSPs 2/27/2015

   It’s common knowledge among managed services providers (MSPs) that the centralized, streamlined management of patching reduces support ticket volume and improves support response times. But many MSPs aren’t aware that patching can also serve as the linchpin that fuels managed services growth with break-fix customers.

7. 6 Essential Steps To Managed Backup Success 11/6/2014

   A couple hours of downtime can do a lot of damage — just ask any major retailer or small business owner. It means lost revenues, loss of customers — and the permanent loss of data. Combine that with the estimated cost of downtime for a small-to-midsize business (SMB) — a staggering $12,500 a day — and you’ve got an invoice that few organizations can afford to pay.

8. 5 Ways Great MSPs Automate Their Managed Services Practices 9/5/2014

   Whether a reseller or managed services provider (MSP) is big or small, new or mature, the question of automation is on everybody’s mind today. As an IT services provider, there are no doubt hundreds of tasks you can be automating for your clients. But beyond the technology, it is important to look at automation as a best practice for your business — a driver for growth and profitability. What’s more, automaton unlocks the key to allowing you to root your business deeply within client processes so that it’s difficult for another MSP to walk in off the street and undercut you.