Scaling necessitates standardization. Standardization necessitates policies and documentation. This is ever so boring but so incredibly important. Here’s how I think about it (with a bit of help from some of my team members who are more intelligent than I am):
When starting a company, especially a service-driven one, the propensity is to just say yes to everything. Deviate from your service offerings? Sure! A late-night text message for something inane? It’s okay. I’ll just bill them. You justify all this by telling yourself and the world that you offer “bespoke” services. That rationalization helps make you feel better when you find yourself doing something ridiculously out of scope.
As time passes, you gain a few employees, and they start feeling lost by a lack of process. Clients expect you to do anything anytime; it can all get a bit pear-shaped quickly.
It took me a while to learn that and, more importantly, that I was setting a bad example for my growing team. An MSP isn’t making fancy Italian suits. Being “bespoke” is more of a burden than an asset. We are delivering a service that is already hard enough to scale. There are plenty of distractions to growth, so why create more for yourself?
So, if you are early in your MSP or service-driven business ownership (or even if you don’t have a process and you are well into it), I found the following things can bring a considerable measure of sanity to your day-to-day:
• State and communicate the operating hours of your business.
• Make sure to highlight additional surcharges for after-hours work to cover yourself in case you find yourself in a situation requiring you to extend your work day (or sacrifice your weekend)
• Standardize your offerings into clear buckets: what do you support vs what you don’t
• Get granular and list out the apps + services you can support. Remain strict about this. No one wants you to learn on the job; you certainly don’t want to break something you can’t fix.
• Standardize your stack and backend infrastructure. Don’t let SaaS sprawl take hold.
• Find vendors or complimentary businesses that can handle things outside your support scope. This will keep you as an asset to your clients and avoid them looking elsewhere for “all in one” shops. In our case, a clear example of this was data migrations or low-voltage cabling jobs. We could do both, but they were HUGE time drains. We started to build a book of vendors that we knew we could trust, and it kept our clients from having to look elsewhere for resources.
• Don’t wait to start writing down policies or best practices for your clients. This ongoing, gargantuan task can ease a new employee’s onboarding or simplify the response to common client problems.
Taking these easy but admittedly administrative steps can have massive impacts on your productivity, client satisfaction, and, yes, your sanity.
Work-life balance, right?
