You're in then you're out...

Is anyone else noticing a dwindling of MSPs out there?

I've actually talked to a number of former self-proclaimed MSPs who have said, "I'm not doing MSP anymore". Some of them felt that they weren't delivering sufficient value to their customers or, quite honestly, they just could never figure it out.

At the same time, I think there's a lot more folks who have added it to their portfolio and that's really the dangerous part for those of us who are true MSPs. If everyone starts saying, "we do managed services too", then we all have to work even harder to differentiate ourselves. It also serves to commoditize our offering. All of your competitors are going to download your marketing materials, change a few logos, and create their own "Me Too" marketing materials. Then they're going to go to eveyrone of your customers and devaluate what you've been doing by offeing Me Too at a lower price.

I think this where we the "Lifestyle MSPs" needs to look alive. We can't just develop our offering and then leave it alone for the next 10, or even 5, years. The would be like Microsoft releasing XP and then thinking that there would never need to be another operating system..and just like Microsoft, we're occasionally going to relase something like Vista and we'll have to backtrack, but we gotta keep it going. We have to be vigillant and on the move. Remember, a rolling stone gathers no moss (of course, you could end up looking like Keith Richards).

My other word of advise is... Don't do anything to commoditize your own offering. We've all done it, we think it's the right way to go, and then we have to do all sorts of undoing. There's a lot of yo-yos out there who are pricing their services by the seat, by the server, by the site...OK. You have to start somewhere. But I don't think this is ever something that you want to publish because MSP isn't about that. That's for Dell and CDW so that they can SKU it up and then have the lowest bidder go out and do thew work. We're MSPs. We need to evaluate each client and charge them based on their needs and the complexity of their network infrastructures. When clients add PCs, their price shouldn't automatically go up by a certain multiplier. Sometimes, YES...other times it might stay the same. If you don't know why, well then... you are one of the yo-yos...and I'm done talking to you for today. ;)

- R