A Starter Guide

to IT Managed Services
A successful managed services business is reliant on a solid
business strategy and service delivery model as well as finding
the right technology for your needs.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Table of Contents

Introduction: Why Should I Read This Guide?

Part 1: The Role of the MSP

Part 2: Formulating the Right Strategy

Part 3: Choosing the Right Tool

Part 4: Pricing for Profit

Part 5: Watch Out for These Traps

Part 6: What You Can Hope to Achieve When Building a Successful MSP

Part 7: Safe Systems: The Right Way to Build a Successful Managed Services Business

The Conclusion: What We Learned

Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Introduction: Why Should I Read This Guide? This guide

will help you:
Dear IT Solution Provider & Services Professional, ■ Develop and execute on a solid business
strategy for running a managed services
I had an interesting conversation with one of our managed services customers the other day. We were discussing the company
journey he took as his IT services company grew from a one-man show to an 18-person managed services company
■ Choose the right IT systems management
with $3 million in revenue in just a few years. He said it was a tough transition, but it was worth it. However, what
solution to help enable your vision
struck me was the motivation behind transforming the business.
■ Price your managed services fairly,
Here is what he said: “I had been working for years in a break-fix model and was making enough money to be competitively, and profitably
comfortable. Then it occurred to me. I had built a nice job for myself but it was far short of a business. And that’s
■ Understand MSP pricing and profit
what I really wanted. I wanted to build a business, and I knew that I had to get serious about managed services.”
scenarios including cost, profit, and
It was the perfect light bulb moment. He had built a job but wanted a business. MRR/project/breakfix calculations
and analysis
That’s what this “Starter Guide to IT Managed Services” is all about. Kaseya works with hundreds of companies that
have transformed their one-man shops into successful managed services businesses with thousands of managed end ■ Avoid some common pitfalls
points. By embracing the Kaseya IT Automation Framework, these customers have formulated and executed on a ■ Understand the benefits that come
managed services strategy that allows them to manage thousands of systems robustly, reliably and securely with with implementing managed services
just a handful of technicians. correctly

So, take a walk with us. Read this guide. Turn your job into a business. ■ Understand how an IT service provider
successfully rolled out managed services
Sincerely and best of luck, for its customers and transformed into
one of the largest MSPs in the country
David Castro
Director, Marketing
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 1: The Role of the MSP

Let’s start with a joke.

What’s the difference between a traditional IT service provider and a managed service provider?

The will and the knowledge to succeed.

Ok. It’s not very funny. In fact, it’s not funny at all. But it’s the truth. The only thing standing in the way of
transforming your break-fix provider into an MSP is you. You have to want it, and you have to know how to
run a business.

The role of a managed service provider is to provide quality IT services to customers quickly and efficiently
Why I want to
for a consistent, low price. But there’s a second part. The role of an MSP is also to make money. Remember, you be an MSP
aren’t just building a job for yourself. You’re building a business, and businesses need to be profitable.
■ MSPs are approximately 200-400%
Finding the right technology is the easy part; management solutions are just tools. MSPs need to focus on the more profitable than non-MSPs
business aspects of managed services, blending a solid business strategy with the right tool that will enable
you to implement your vision. ■ Pure play MSPs are approximately
25-50% more profitable than hybrid
model MSPs

■ MSPs are 3x to 10x more valuable than

traditional VARs

Source: Kaseya Worldwide Customer Survey, 2012

Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 2: Formulating the Right Strategy Top 10 List of IT

Tasks Primed for
Building a successful business is more than just technology. Successful companies understand how to take the art of Automation
providing a service and turn it into a business. They make sure they get the basics right. They are good companies
1. Patch management and software
first—and then they get the technology.
deployment
Companies that get the business part right and flub the technology part won’t grow very fast but will chug along and 2. User and group maintenance
survive. On the other hand, service providers that use the right technology but can’t handle growth or manage daily 3. Network security sweeps
operations will most likely fail. However, it’s companies that get both the business right and choose the appropriate 4. Disk usage scans
management solution for their needs that are wildly successful. Running the business the right way is that critical. 5. Device and network performance
monitoring
Here are six tips that you can use to build a profitable business model: 6. File transfers
7. Code promotion (from staging to
1. Take a Proactive, Preventative Approach production)
Any dentist will tell you that it’s much easier—and less painful—to prevent a cavity than it is to pull a rotten tooth. 8. High-level, routine administration
It’s also a better business model because years of semi-annual checkups likely are more profitable for the dentist than 9. Reboots
a one-time tooth extraction. It’s the same with IT systems management. Identifying and heading off minor problems 10. Malware scans
before they become major issues is a more efficient and more successful way of maintaining the availability and
performance of your customers’ systems. Source: Kaseya Community Postings &
Script Utilization Statistics, 2012
Automation is the key. Make it a standard business practice to identify and resolve issues before users are aware.
Set thresholds—capacity and memory ceilings—that your customers’ systems need to meet to be in compliance.
If they fall out of compliance (or come close), have automatic and manual processes in place to fix them.
Being proactive reduces downtime and speeds time to resolution, ensuring your customers’ users have access to
the tools and information they need. At the same time, preventing problems helps avoid fire drills where your team
is forced to run around putting out fires to maintain availability and performance standards. If they’re not constantly
cleaning up, they’re able to focus on more strategic (read: more revenue-producing or more customer-focused)
projects.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

2. Stop Managing Individual Machines and Start Managing Policies and Machine Groups
The days of managing machines one at a time are over. Successful MSPs create, update and apply policies to groups
of machines, managing exceptions while keeping systems in compliance of predetermined conditions. Create, edit
and push out base images for each type of machine in your customers’ environments—Windows 7 desktops,
Exchange servers, iPads, Finance Department—and spend your time making sure the images are robust and applied
consistently. Aggregate your management tasks and think how you can apply changes by machine group (ie,
Exhange servers) across your entire customer base. Focusing on exceptions rather than each machine streamlines
IT systems management, eliminating the repetition typically associated with one-machine-at-a-time maintenance
while ensuring consistent IT service across environments.

3. Talk Cash
Moolah. Greenbacks. Clams. Money is the universal language. Every conversation you have with customers needs
to be based on how much budget you can save them or how much additional revenue you can generate. A customer
needs to upgrade to Windows 7? Position it as a way to increase the productivity of users and to streamline licensing
costs. A backup process needs to be made more efficient? Mention the price of a typical data recovery job and the
cost savings of using less bandwidth.

When going after new business, calculate how much the customer spends on managing IT and show how much
they can save by outsourcing to you. Stress that they will be able to focus on their core business because you have IT
covered. Get internal IT staffs on your side by quantifying how you can enhance their efforts, create efficiencies and
make their lives much easier.

4. Get Your Head in the Clouds

Successful MSPs manage a variety of IT services for their customers delivered through the cloud. This allows them
to pick best of breed solutions and deliver these services to customers in an efficient manner. Customers deserve a
choice of solutions that work best for them—rather than what is available through their technology provider.

For the MSP, delivering services through the cloud allows it to become a manager of services rather than simply a
technician. By out-sourcing the nitty-gritty to cloud providers, MSPs can focus on high-level strategy, helping
customers manage relationships and integration with cloud vendors.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

5. Keep Up with the Jones’s Top Needs

It’s important to stay on top of innovation in the IT industry, constantly improving your services while finding new
ways to benefit customers. Get certified. Take classes. Participate in the social conversation taking place in the growing of IT Users
number of community-focused destinations. Connect with evangelists within the industry so you can pass that
■ End-to-end device protection
knowledge on to your customers. And be creative when marketing yourself.
■ Guaranteed services levels
There are many smaller companies that could benefit from managed services but may not know any better. Spend the
effort educating potential clients, investing now for a payoff down the road. Your goal should be to create a community ■ Minimal disruption to user productivity
of like-minded business professionals who can share best practices and contribute to the common good. It’s also and core business processes
important to be wary of high-maintenance customers who may not be worth holding onto and may drag down your
more put-together clients.

Keeping on top of trends and innovation in the industry allows you to be nimble and flexible so you can take
Top Needs
advantage of market opportunities. And it keeps you locked in with the needs of your customers and it virtually of MSPs
eliminates any thoughts they may have of replacing you.
■ High customer satisfaction rates
6. Target the Suits ■ Low administrative expenses
Many MSPs have solid relationships with the boots on the ground, the guys who plan and operate their customers’ IT
strategies. That’s great, but don’t forget to embrace users and the management team. Talk to users about their IT needs ■ Strong profits
and get a feel for the business so you can help the company achieve its goals. Be seen as a technology partner in the ■ Industry credibility
boardroom rather than a service provider beholden to the IT department. It’s also important to manage expectations
■ Scalable foundation for long-term growth
through monthly and quarterly meetings, making sure everyone is on the same page with IT’s role and capacity
planning. These regular meetings can go a long way toward ensuring management knows the good work your team Source: Kaseya Worldwide Customer Survey, 2012
is doing and how you can help the company in the future.

Properly engaged, users can be an asset, used to conduct basic maintenance on distributed machines so you
don’t have to. Set up policies that allow them to make authorized configuration changes, downloads, patches and
applications (and make sure you block unauthorized changes as well). User self service saves you time, saves users
time, gives them a stake in the health of their system and ensures consistent IT service across the organization.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 3: Choose the Right Tool

The managed services business model is enabled by the technology you use to deliver IT services to your customers.
However, there are dozens of solutions. How do you choose the right one for your unique needs?
IT systems management solutions come in several flavors based on the
software’s architecture.

Point Products
Single-feature point products—such as an asset management solution, a help desk solution or monitoring software—
are a common option for smaller network deployments or for IT professionals with a lot of patience for integrating dis-
parate management solutions. They work well for what they are engineered to do but should not be an option for a
provider that is serious about managed services. The initial cost may be tempting, but you have to weigh that against
the long-term overhead burden from implementing, learning and maintaining multiple tools.

Appliances
Appliances are advertised as simple to install, simple to configure and simple to use—essentially a tempting way to
short-cut the complexities of initial IT systems management deployment. But they tend to sacrifice functionality and
flexibility for ease of use and cost. Feature sets tend to be more limited than comparable toolsets, which can leave you
with gaps in service when it comes to implementing a complete and proactive IT systems management strategy.

Agentless Software
Agentless management solutions typically provide a richer feature-set than appliances and don’t require that software
be deployed on each system. Instead, management functions and services are provided over the network (or even over
the Internet). However, agentless software is completely dependent on network connections. If the network goes
down so does your management solution. Uncertain reliability could take away the visibility into your network and in-
hibit your ability to manage systems just when you need those capabilities the most.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Agent-Based Software
Agent-based software solutions can provide the kinds of feature sets, reliability and robustness required by just about
any sized customer from small SMBs to large enterprises. By placing natively written agents on each managed device,
MSPs are given the greatest level of control to perform any task necessary. Some of the leading solution providers offer
lightweight agents (<2MB) and boast rapid deployments at rates that exceed 99 percent. Agent-based software is
protected from outside influence and can continue to operate when non-agent based software may be effected by
network, authentication or configuration issues.

Cloud Services
Many MSPs are now looking to the cloud to deliver IT services to their customers. The ability to package best of breed
solutions in a single branded managed service is a cost effective way to efficiently monitor, maintain, update, secure
and back up distributed systems.
No architecture is a true magic bullet, but a combination of several architectures can provide powerful functionality,
scalability and control while maintaining a high-level of service delivery. The right ITSM solution should be able to
manage through agentless technology at all times (with perhaps limited functionality) and be able to manage through
agents for full functionality (with some services delivered through the cloud). This dual architecture ensures stability
and consistency throughout your customers’ environments—no matter what gets thrown at you. It’s important to have
both the context (visibility into all systems) and the ability to take quick, immediate action (control over all systems)
when necessary.

Relative Cost of MSP Tools

IT Management Tool Transaction Cost Total Lifetime Cost

Open Source 0 $$

Point Source $ $

Appliance $ $$

SMB On Premise Solution $$ $$

SMB Cloud Solution $ $$$

Enterprise Solution $$$ $$$

Key: low cost ($), high cost ($$$) Source: Kaseya Internal Management Survey, 2012
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Choosing the Right Tool

Feature Benefit Impact

Eliminate redundant, tedious Reduce human error; provide better services;

Automated
administration efficient service delivery; higher margins

Remote Provides visibility and control Efficient service delivery; higher margins

Nothing falls through the cracks;

Complete Standard service delivery across the spectrum
seen as a one-stop shop

Can manage machines from anywhere Services get done in a timely

Accessible
with an Internet connection manner; more secure

Improved user experience;

Fast Resolution Improve uptime
more productive employees

Can add systems to the management Can grow as the market dictates without
Scalable
apparatus without degrading existing services worrying about capacity or capabilities

Small footprint on managed

Light-Weight No performance degradation
machine and network
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 4: Pricing for Profit

A big part of the managed services business model is the ability to charge a single, low price per managed machine.
An alternative is to charge a bundled price per IT user or per service offered. These prices promote efficient service
delivery since the less money you spend maintaining and updating machines the higher your margins will be. It also
gives your customers a consistent and predictable budget item so they can plan appropriately (and it’s typically less
than they spend doing it themselves, too).

But what should that price be? We’ve surveyed our most successful managed services customers for you, and they
suggest MSPs be flexible, yet consistent, with pricing. Here is a look at some pricing options from a variety of service
providers in various stages of the MSP development track. As you can see, the more providers advance toward true
managed services the more profitable—and valuable—they become.

KPI/Status Break Fix Reactive Proactive Managed

$52 per PC
Average Deal Size Varies $100 per hour $200 to $3,000
$167 per server

Gross Profit Less than 10% 50% 70% Greater than 75%

Utilization Less than 50% per tech 50% per tech 70% per tech 90% per tech

Firm Valuation Less than 0.2 0.3 1.25 2.0

Source: Kaseya Worldwide Customer Survey, 2012

Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Ok, so how to do I go about pricing IT managed services?

The short answer is, “It’s completely up to you.” And whatever the answer, it should be consistent with your MSP
business strategy goals, such as “I am a pure play MSP” or “I am a hybrid MSP.” Once you make your growth strategy
decision, the most common MSP pricing strategies are:
■ Per device, such as per desktop, per mobile device or per server
■ Per user, such as for CTO or for Network Administrator
■ Per location, such as for Corporate Office or for Branch Office

A few other pricing strategies are:

■ Per “expected outcome,” such as for a 5 minute response SLA or for Silver Level SLA
■ Per “use case” or “value-based,” such as for Bundled Security Services for Bundled Business Continuity Services

Regardless of your pricing strategy, the key to your MSP success is to price your managed services based on value.
You must speak with your customers—and prospects—to determine the value they place on having optimized
systems and protected networks. For example, a retail client who collects $10,000 in online sales per hour values
server monitoring services, business continuity services and rapid response SLAs much differently than a branch office
with only a few part time employees that runs quarterly reports that are not strategic to the firm’s corporate office.

Using value-based pricing will ensure that you are maximizing profits…but you must know the cost of your service
delivery efforts first.

So, how do I calculate my service delivery cost?

The cost of service delivery is the sum of the cost of your billable employees plus the cost of your infrastructure
(overhead). These two costs then can be broken down to determine a base hourly cost to give you a full understand-
ing of your service delivery cost so that you can pick a pricing strategy that maximizes the profit for your MSP.

What constitutes billable employee cost?

Billable employee cost includes everything that is reflected on a billable employee’s W2 at the end of the year,
including costs above and beyond gross compensation. These costs include compensation, FICA, FUTA, SUTA,
disability, worker’s compensation, healthcare, sick leave, PTO, vacation and holiday pay, profit sharing, pensions,
401k matching contributions, retirement benefits and any other additional bonuses earned.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

What constitutes overhead cost?

Overhead cost includes all of your other business expenses—including all non-billable employee costs. These include
compensation, insurance, tools, company meetings, training and education, phone and Internet services, vehicle costs,
utilities, rent, equipment and maintenance, supplies, loan service, bank fees, other payroll and taxes.

To determine your full hourly cost, which remains a common cost basis for a lot of IT services work, sum your billable
employee cost and overhead cost, divide that sum by the number of billable staff, and divide that number again by
2080 (typical paid work hours per year).

In a typical scenario (let’s say you have three billable employees) your billable employee cost is $225,000 per year
and your overhead cost is $300,000 annually. The hourly cost determination for three billable employees is:
■ Annual cost (employee cost = $225,000) + (overhead cost = $300,000) = $525,000
■ $525,000 / 3 (billable employees) = $175,000
■ $175,000 / 2080 (paid work hours/yr) = $84.13

In this example, your hourly employee cost is $84.13.

But how does utilization rate impact cost?

Your billable employee’s utilization rate will impact your true cost of service delivery. In this example, a 100 percent
utilization rate assumes no vacations, sick days, holidays, training days, drive time, etc., and the impacts on hourly
cost are directly affected by the utilization rate:

Utilization Rate @ 50% @ 75% @ 85% @ 100%

Hourly employee cost per hour $168.26 $112.17 $98.98 $84.13

How do I price managed services for profit?

To show how price and cost impacts MSP profitability, consider a typical MSP scenario. Assume you have 15
managed services contracts averaging $4,000 each (value-based pricing) for a gross revenue amount of $60,000
per month.
Next let’s assume you have 3 service desk technicians whose combined full hourly employee cost at 100 percent
utilization is $84.13 per hour.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Now assume that for the last billable month, your service desk technicians spent 150 hours managing service desk
requests and proactively patching, updating and optimizing your clients’ endpoints. Let’s also assume that their
overall utilization was 75 percent for that month (so their hourly cost will be $112.17, in this scenario).

Using these data points you can determine the cost to support your managed service contracts for the month,
including your margins, as follows:

Metric Calculation note Result

Revenue 15 contracts x $4,000 per contract $60,000
Cost 150 billable hours x $112.17 (@75% utilization) $16,825
Profit Revenue - cost $43,175
Margin (Profit / revenue) x 100 72%

A margin of 72%. Managed services are highly profitable in this scenario, aren’t they?

But what about the rest of the billable hours in the month?
In this scenario, we’ve only accounted for 150 hours out of a potential 480 for that month (40 hours x 4 weeks x 3
billable employees), so we have a balance of 330 hours left. Assume we allocate these hours to T&M work and
projects. Again using a factor of 75 percent for utilization, this allows 247 hours to distribute evenly in this example
(123 hours to T&M work and 124 hours for project work).

Let’s assume a T&M rate at $150/hr and a Project rate at $200/hr. Hence, we are a hybrid MSP, with a mix of pure
play managed services and consulting projects.

So let’s take a look at our total blended revenue, costs, profit and margin for the month, which includes the
following revenues:

Metric Calculation note Result

Managed services revenue 15 contracts x $4,000 per contract $60,000
T&M revenue 123 billable hours x $150 per hour $18,450
Project revenue 124 billable hours x $200 per hour $24,800
Total monthly revenue $103,250
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

And it also includes blended costs:

Metric Calculation note Result

Managed services cost 150 billable hours x $112.17 (@75% utilization) $16,825
T&M cost 123 billable hours x $112.17 per hour $13,797
Project cost 124 billable hours x $112.17 per hour $13,909
Total monthly cost $44,531

So your blended profit is $58,719 (monthly revenue – monthly cost).

And your blended margin is 57% (blended profit / blended revenue).

In this example, can you see the impact of non-managed service work and how it impacts the profitability of your
MSP (72% pure play vs 57% blended)?

Also, the MSP in this blended revenue scenario manages a mix of 58 percent recurring service contracts.
Using these data, they can determine if they should acquire more service contracts or maintain this balance
(to support a large hardware rollout with a key customer, for example).

In conclusion, this is a very basic analysis for a MSP to determine margins when utilizing the same group of billable
employees to deliver flat-fee, time and materials and project-based services at different billing rates. Using scenarios
such as these, you can calculate a cost and fee structure to analyze the performance of your MSP and make services
mix changes, as needed, to help you achieve your long term MSP business strategy goals.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 5: Watch Out for These Traps

The allure of the managed services business model is strong. Recall our scenario of 72 percent margins?

Migrating to a managed services business can be complex, yet it doesn’t have to be. Once you decide to make
the switch, or if you’ve already made the decision, avoid these common pitfalls:

Getting Bogged Down by Technology

Avoid IT systems management solutions that require complex integration and have limited visibility and control.
Resist the urge to save capital costs by using freeware or heavily-discounted solutions. They are going to cause more
trouble than they are worth. Solutions that bog down your staff prevent you from focusing on the aspects of building
a managed services business that truly matter. Instead, focus on formulating a service delivery strategy, improving
Most Common
communication with customers and settling on set processes. Barriers to MSP
Getting Ahead of Yourself Success
Growth is good, but make sure you’re not biting off more than you can chew. Have the infrastructure in place to
scale effectively without degrading services for existing customers. ■ Inconsistent execution due to lack
of centralized oversight and control
Getting Into a Routine
■ Reactive technical processes
Consistency is good but make sure you work on things that make work fun for you and your staff. No one grows up
■ Labor intensive processes
dreaming of patching machines every night. Automate much of the tedious administration typically associated with
IT systems management, and challenge your employees to work on projects they care about and initiatives that help
Source: ChannelPro Magazine, 2012
customers become even more successful.

Getting Stuck in Overtime

Overtime is a productivity killer, encouraging disengaged technicians to slow down or slack off. This can sap margins
and cause cost overruns for customers. Automate tasks that have to be done overnight or on the weekends and
empower your technicians with remote access tools that enable fast resolution from home or on the road.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 6: What You Can Hope to Achieve “With Kaseya, one of

When Building a Successful MSP our people is equal to
5 to 10 people working
manually on the ground
The managed services business model—when set up and executed correctly—gives you...
elsewhere.”
Better Visibility Across Customer Environments
Chris Wiser
CEO, TechSquadIT

And...
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Better Control Over Managed Assets

Which leads to...
Higher Quality of IT Service for Users
And...
Lower Cost of Operations
Which leads to...
Additional Revenue for Your Business
And...
Higher Profit for Your Managed Services Business
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

Part 7: Safe Systems: The Right Way to

Build a Successful Business

Long a proponent of extending its reach beyond the Southeast, the management team at Safe Systems set a goal in
2005 to grow its customer base by 25 percent per year for the next four years and transform the company into a
national player. The company set a lofty growth goal of 15,000 managed devices across the US, which was five times
the number of current systems that administrators monitored and maintained.

In order to meet this aggressive goal, Safe Systems decided to migrate from a traditional break-fix services company
to a more efficient managed services business model, providing basic monitoring and maintenance services for a
Safe Systems
fixed price. However, the company was having trouble scaling its managed services delivery model past 3,000
managed assets—well short of the ultimate goal.
at a Glance:
Profile: As a technology partner, and recent
“After several months of trying to implement managed services we realized we needed to not just change the way
recipient of several prestigious awards, Safe
we manage our customers’ systems, we needed to change our whole business model,” said Curt Frierson, executive Systems has worked with over 600 financial
vice president of technology and education for Safe Systems. institutions and manages more than 25,000
network devices nationwide.
Scalability through a New IT Automation Platform
Founded: 1993
Hitting reset, Safe Systems created and rolled out a new managed services framework that embraces automation,
Headquarters: Alpharetta, Georgia
policy management and a proactive approach to delivering IT services to its growing customer base. After investigat-
ing software from Dell, N-Able and Level Platforms, Safe Systems deployed a managed services solution from Kaseya Website: www.safesystems.com
that gives its administrators complete access and visibility into its customers’ IT environments from a central
Web-based console—regardless of the location of each system. The automatic and remote solution allows
technicians to set policies for groups of systems and keep the machines in compliance.

Critical to its new strategy, Safe Systems set up a Network Operations Center (NOC) staffed with dedicated technicians
who could roll out standardized managed services seamlessly and quickly across the country. Communications with
customers improved, and relationships turned into partnerships.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

“We can now scale our services much more easily with Kaseya, helping us migrate customers over to the new service
delivery model as they come up for contract renewal with minimal interruption to day-to-day operations or customer
Five keys to
service,” Frierson said. engaging with
As part of its assessment services for new customers, Safe Systems used to send two engineers on-site—often customers
flying them from Atlanta—to evaluate the network and make recommendations based on growth trends, current
1. Have a process in place
inefficiencies and business goals. The engineers would stay on-site on the company’s dime for several days conducting
2. Provide proactive solutions
the service. Now, this same service can be conducted remotely through the Kaseya solution in several hours, speeding and automate everything
up the deployment process, saving travel costs and further enabling seamless scalability of the company’s services. 3. Constantly review
4. Measure yourself in $$$
Fast, Pragmatic Business Growth 5. Earn trust

As a result, Safe Systems was able to meet its aggressive growth goals, surpassing 25,000 managed systems in early
Curt Frierson
2012. Most importantly, this growth has occurred without the company having to add staff, dramatically increasing executive vice president of technology
profit margins that enabled further investment into their growth plan. While technology was a major enabler of the and education, Safe Systems
managed services business model, it was the realization that the way the company was run needed to be addressed
that made Safe Systems the major IT service provider it is today.
Kaseya | A Starter Guide to IT Managed Services

The Conclusion: What We Learned

The IT landscape is littered with service providers that tried to migrate to the managed services business model and
failed. More times than not, it wasn’t a lack of vision or technology that doomed these dreamers. The problem is
that these companies continued to operate like a break-fix provider, acting like the geek down the hall who tinkers
with computers instead of a business-focused technology partner. The most profitable MSPs focus on growth and
developing sales and marketing strategies to drive their business strategy because they realize they can use tools
and processes to manage the routine IT management tasks. The companies that succeed are able to be proactive,
engage with users and the management team, and discuss IT in terms of revenue to create communities of
customers that share best practices.

At the same time, the tools you choose to deliver managed services aren’t interchangeable. Make sure you choose
an ITSM solution that gives you complete visibility into and control over your customers’ IT assets from a central
management console. This allows you to deliver efficient IT services to a growing client base, enabling the managed
services business model and putting you on the path to building a successful and profitable business.

Go for it. You’ll be glad you did.

About Kaseya
Kaseya is the leading global provider of IT Systems Management software. Kaseya solutions empower virtually everyone –– from individual consumers to
large corporations and IT service providers –– to proactively monitor,manage and control IT assets remotely, easily and efficiently from one integrated
Web-based platform.

For more information, visit www.kaseya.com Contact Kaseya: [email protected]

For a free 30 day trial visit www.kaseya.com/download
©2012 Kaseya. All rights reserved. Kaseya and the Kaseya logo are among the trademarks or registered trademarks owned by or licensed to Kaseya International Limited. All other marks are the property of
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