We at TruMethods built a benchmarking platform for our peer group members. It looks at financial data, operational data, sales data, marketing data, and does a bunch of great calculations. We’ve added more ways to view the MSP business over time. More recently, we added some calculations to help MSPs simplify their businesses.
On the platform, MSPs can now calculate professional services revenue per engineer. Each professional services resource should generate at least $20,000 of monthly revenue. So, if you, on average, have $15,000 a month of professional services, and you have three people in that area, you need to ask the question, “What’s everybody doing?”
The second calculation we added looks at the average number of tickets divided by the number of support resources you have available. Each support resource should be able to close 10 to 14 tickets a day. Again, if you have five people closing three people’s worth of tickets, you must ask, “What’s everybody doing?”
Professional services and support need to be efficient, not just for the obvious reasons of leverage and profitability, but also because when they’re inefficient, you can’t have that capacity working on value-added proactive roles, such as alignment, vCIO, and centralized services. And today, that also means that you can’t secure yourself or your customers the way that you would like to.
Many MSPs are working so hard to grow their revenue and profitability. But these two service delivery areas keep holding them back. They create resistance in the business that’s impossible to overcome.
It’s time to ask, “What’s everybody doing?”
