Erick Simpson’s MSP Newsletter | January 2021

Building a highly profitable, growing business isn’t easy – it’s like trying to eat an elephant, and what’s the best way to do that? One bite at a time, and I like to add that we start at the tail and end at the trunk – with a strategy and plan to know where we are and where we’re going and know when we get there.

This is where the “Four Ps” of business growth comes into play. I like to focus on each of these “Ps” when I help partners improve their business performance.

The first P is for your People, and of the four P’s it seems this one is the most challenging – why? That’s easy – it’s because people are involved! So how do we maximize the value of our people? We can start by leveraging behavioral assessments during the hiring process to ensure the candidates we hire are naturally “wired” from a behavioral perspective for the requirements of the job role.

The closer their natural behavior aligns with that required by the role they are filling, the more satisfied, effective and successful they will be out of the gate. But what about existing staff? We can also apply these behavioral assessments to ensure they already occupy the “right seat on the bus” – and if there is a role more suited to their natural behavior than the one they currently occupy, we transition them, so that they also become more satisfied, effective and successful in that new role.

We also maximize people value by training and mentoring them, and crafting compensation plans that incentivize performance and reward success. And we provide more frequent performance evaluations than yearly, to provide more timely feedback and course-correction, allowing them to more rapidly improve their performance to qualify for and receive performance incentives, rewards, recognition and bonuses. Next, we develop, document and publish a solid succession strategy with commensurate job role compensation, and work diligently with our staff to identify and support their desired career path within the organization. The results of this type of strategy deliver happier, productive high performers that are well trained and compensated to become our next generation of business leaders.

The second P is Platforms. We maximize our platform and system value by integrating and optimizing them to deliver the maximum level of automation, reporting and alerting possible, and reduce redundancy and the complexity of multiple dashboards for critical business functions.

Simplifying, consolidating and reducing overlap in existing and legacy platforms increases productivity and efficiency and centralizes business data, making it easier for our teams to do their jobs more effectively and profitably, and allows us to make data-drive decisions with a high confidence level in our reported data. This effort should extend beyond our internal systems to our external platforms as well, and we should leverage our vendor partners for help in optimizing and integrating these systems.

The 3rd “P” is for Process. Without standardized, documented processes to follow, our people will make decisions based on what they think is the right approach. And as you and I know, in many cases they may make a decision differently than we would like them to. But in the absence of process, this is what happens.

The guidance here is to delegate appropriate processes for your team to document, then institute a review process and version control after approval and implementation. Decide where this documentation will be stored and who has access to read and update it based on your version control parameters.

Next, roll each process out to the appropriate resources, and measure and hold them accountable to following them. When everyone is doing things the same way, you should expect similar outcomes or results. This will make it easier to identify outliers and address them quickly to get back on track.

The 4th and final “P” is Products (and services). And maximizing the value of these includes a combination of the four other “P”s – your People, your Platforms, and your Processes.

When you’ve maximized the value of each of those 3 “P”s with a focus on your products and service delivery, you’ll be able to bundle, price, sell and deliver your services at the highest value and margins, supported by solid On-Boarding, deployment and ongoing service delivery processes and platforms, and delivered by highly trained, enthusiastic and effective high-performers.

Strengthening your product and service value in general will help you to architect, sell and deliver high-value, secure services to your prospects and clients defined in effective statements of work, governed by strict SLAs and structured in long-term MRR agreements for Cloud, MSP and MSSP services, or individual SOWs for valuable project-based deliverables.

It takes discipline and accountability to improve each of your Four Ps, and you may not be able to work on all of them concurrently. I encourage you to review each of them, and prioritize 3 high-priority and high-ROI generating tasks within each P, and implement a strategy to work on them weekly with your team – and delegate as appropriate – so that you can eat the elephant one bite at a time…