Vlad Mazek – Vladville Blog

The last article I wrote about MSPs still not growing in 2010 really struck a chord with many of the MSPs that read this blog. Due to the work insanity I haven’t had a chance to reply to all of the messages sent to vlad@vladville.com but I will over the next 2-3 weeks. The primary problem is that many of you are asking very specific “how” questions and that largely depends on where you are, how much money you have to spend, how much money you need to make, etc.

One of the primary questions that I hope to answer today is how we’ve grown in the 1st quarter so tremendously. I know that every 1st of the year people make a ton of resolutions – and when those resolutions don’t pan out in March while others are growing – it can be painful. Hang in there. Here is our story:

In December 2009 I made a really long and exhausting trip through California and up the east coast visiting with our strategic partners trying to establish what 2010 was going to be for us. Some of these companies were (much) larger than mine so I got a lot of really good advice that fit my company but not quite Fortune 500 (which is what the really expensive business consultants will offer you night and day). Anyhow, here are some changes we’ve made that gave us a 30% boost in profits in Q1:

1. Outsourced irrelevant stuff

We completely decimated the idea of hand holding. This was one of the problems OWN had largely due to my micromanagement and willingness to help everyone with everything, regardless of revenues that account may bring. Treat everyone the same, right? Well, no. We have very clear set of procedures we follow at Own Web Now and how we deliver the service – but there are many people that refuse to read the documentation, assign the task to their interns or new hires, etc and we spend a ton of time actually “training” people to deal with deployments and support. This is something we’ve thoroughly documented and written and shot videos about.

So we created http://go.ownwebnow.com and moved all of our business intelligence into the Partner Guide.

Then with Howard Cunningham’s help (awesome MSP in the Washington DC area and an all around great guy) we outsourced all our Tier 1 (ie: “Reading the documentation over the phone”) support to a third party.

This had a chain effect of changes throughout our organization. Because we were now able to see the real issues and let the staff that had expertise actually apply it we were able to move up our delivery timelines – a lot – because we were not stuck on the phone with ignorant people all day.

2. Focused on marketing first

Second, we really added a lot of professional flare to our marketing. The way we handled marketing before was “wouldn’t it be cool” and “let’s try this?” and we actually studied and qualified our marketing efforts.

This was the #1 factor this quarter. Instead of trying to create products and services that fix peoples problems, we’re telling people how our products and services fix peoples problems.

We literally just changed our message. And it resonated well.

3. Standardized operations and procedures

Following step #1, we aggressively pursued documentation and SOP processes. Literally every spare moment we’ve had has been dedicated to documentation, videos, podcasts and whitepapers both internal and external.

By being able to clearly define what we do and how we do it we can hire people and onboard them quickly. For external purposes, we were able to grow rapidly without spending a lot of time in support.

Somewhere between our support sucking and our partners not reading the documentation and misconfiguring the services (again, due to our documentation being insufficient or inconvenient) we spent a ton of time in the past dealing with “issues” – In Q1, one cursed Exchange DEWEY box aside, we were able to move forward a lot.

4. Removed growing pains

Finally, we were able to address a lot of growing pains by teaming up with Spherion. They are a large temp agency and once we were able to take steps #1 and #3 it became very easy to address issues and make things happen fast. For example, the process that typically took months in the past only took 3 business days.

Looking Forward

Most of the issues that OWN has had to deal with were caused by me, one way or another. While OWN has grown tremendously through the years I’ve retained a lot of that “DIY attitude” towards many aspects of my organization that really were not healthy for the long term. There were also a few “values” that I held on to way too long that caused a lot of people to abuse us.  Live and learn 🙂

The other thing that I feel made a huge difference is that I really opened up my ears to all the input – not just the suggestions my peers made – and that has made all the difference. When you spend all of your time getting your advice from the same bunch of people then you really narrow down your vision and your ability to grow past what everyone else can see. I can tell you that the numbers we posted in Q1 didn’t come from the same client base we’ve had in 2008 or 2009. They also didn’t sign on with us for the same things we’ve signed on people in the past. The key here is that as business changes it needs to be more open to the external suggestions and not live solely on the ambitions and goals of it’s founder and his buddies. 🙂 Lesson learned.

The future for OWN looks really bright and ExchangeDefender’s new business model has really opened up a ton of opportunities around other products that we’re looking to add to it. My primary agenda for Q2 is to push the pedal to the metal when it comes to knowledge sharing and get us more structured for the new products. In Q3 I’ll be mostly doing the marketing deal and hopefully facilitating the launch of the new products and some of the big licensing stuff that was just signed. The Q4 stuff is still a bit of a secret 🙂

I’m extremely biased (because as an Autotask integrator we stand to make and save a ton of money) in my opinion but I’ll offer it to you anyhow: The Autotask acquisition of VARStreet is perhaps the biggest announcement to hit the MSP space in quite some time. How so?

Think of VARStreet as an “App store” service for software companies (like mine) and service providers (like you) where the nightmares of partnerships, paperwork, agreements and licensing junk are reduced down to the point and click.

I was at MSP University event when Len DiCostanzo started discussing this subject with the MSPs in attendance. The premise of having an integrated shopping cart for the MSP is huge in terms of time savings and prospecting. I can tell you that because the biggest obstacle in doing commerce in the MSP world (as far as vendors and MSPs are concerned) isn’t the golf or the partnership or the handshakes with the owner – it’s making the solution easy to price, quote and position for the sales staff that actually makes the transactions happen.

The MSP industry and the associated PSA & RMM tools have made significant progress over the past year in the area of integrations – we can at this point pretty easily support your purchases directly through Autotask, we can sync your seat counts for reoccuring services, we can streamline the process of getting into the clients service through LiveLinks, etc – so what happens after the line which is dotted is signed is pretty smooth.

VARStreet is about the only thing out there, in my opinion, that will make the process that happens before the purchase smoother. At this point OWN distributes “Sales Cheat Sheets” for our products, brandable marketing collateral, go to market pamphlets and all this stuff you can “attach” to the quote or proposal – something that typically involves further complexity with a quoting tool, etc. In other words, we have a good bureaucracy of a process behind trying to get the sale.

With VARStreet all that changes.

Kudos to Autotask for spending their money wisely. We’ll be at the Autotask Live Conference later this month and I’m very interested in learning how we can further automate the process of selling. Nearly all the MSPs I talk about have growth goals – and you grow by selling more. Interesting times indeed.