[55] – Introduction To The MSP Series

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Rayanne Buccianico and Chris Tim. Learn how to get the most out of your PSA tool and manage your business by maximizing profitability and increasing efficiency within your MSP business. Let's listen in. Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of PSA Impact with your hosts myself, Chris Tim, and my co-host, Rayanne Buccianico. Hey, Rayanne, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great today, Chris, how are you? I'm very well, thank you. Looking forward to the holiday season. Everything's going well, and how's the weather over there in Florida this time of the year? Well, we're in that yo-yo weather pattern where one day it's like 77 degrees like today, and then the next day it might be 56 as our high, and of course we're in Fahrenheit, not centigrade again.

So it's up, it's down, it's up, it's down, but it's always a beautiful day here this time of year in Florida. How's things in the UK? The UK is the UK, the weather's British weather. No raining? Not yet, it was raining earlier on, but it's 6 p.m. in the evening and it's pitch dark outside and it's been pitch dark for two hours, but that's the joys of living in Britain, and we kind of have to have the dark days early, but in the summers we get great days that last until 9, 10 o'clock at night, so we have the good and the bad.

Always great to catch up with you. So what do we have on our plate today? Yeah, so today we're going to start our new series all about kind of people choosing PSA tools, what motivates somebody to choose a particular PSA tool, what makes somebody switch to a PSA tool, and then also go on to talking with people who have had PSA tools for a long time that have no intention to move, what's motivating them to stay, those kind of things. So over the next sort of four or five episodes, we're going to be speaking to different MSPs in various stages of their MSPs, right from somebody making a decision on which PSA to choose up until somebody that's actually using a PSA tool and has no intention of moving. I love it.

I love it. You know, I don't know that we've had to make MSPs on our show so far, and I always love geeking out with MSPs from around the world, so I can't wait to talk with them. But to kick things off, right, well, and of course, we can start with the very simple, you know, what is a PSA tool and what is not a PSA tool, right? But I also kind of want to maybe touch on some things that people should consider when they're choosing a PSA, and what do you want to do with it? What do you expect out of your PSA?

You know, and why would anybody change the number one tool that runs your business after you've been using it for a certain number of years? So starting with what is and what is not a PSA tool, what are your thoughts on that? Great topics, Rayanne, and of course, now I'm absolutely in my element because these are like my absolute all-time favorite things to talk about. So we finally found the ultimate subject I love talking about. This is like the coup de grace, right?

Exactly, exactly. So let me start by saying what is not a PSA tool, right? And I think everyone in this industry, including me when I first started, everyone looks at a PSA tool as being a service desk. So they buy a PSA tool specifically because they need a service desk for their business. And that's the first thing they look at is, you know, the service delivery side of their business, and they want a tool that's going to kind of fix that and make that side work.

So people kind of focus on choosing a PSA tool specifically because they're needing a service desk. And that's that's not a PSA tool. A PSA tool should be looked at as a, you know, as a business management platform. So I don't even actually like to use the word PSA, even though my book title has the word PSA in it. I don't like using the word PSA purely because to me, it's it's more of a business management tool because that's effectively what it's doing, right?

Is it's a tool that's going to manage your entire business from cradle to grave, right? From when you first find that very first prospect until they no longer are a customer, if that ever gets to the point. But all the way through to to kind of managing the prospect and, you know, tracking the opportunities when they become a customer, then doing all of that service delivery side of it, as well as billing and invoicing and all of that kind of stuff. So it runs your whole business. So a PSA tool is something that is going to have all of those those aspects in it.

CRM, project management, service desk, invoicing, billing, all of those kind of things in the accounting world, we call that like a practice management or I've been in professional services for a very long time and we used to call it our time and billing system. And then over after a while, over the years, it kind of evolved into a complete practice management where you're not just entering your time and then preparing the invoices, but you're also managing your clients inside the system. And now, like you say, with the opportunities, we can track the pipeline and we can track the procurement and the inventory or the stock. There's so many things that go into the PSA. And I think that, you know, one of the things that when you're thinking about getting your very first PSA, and that's going to be our first MSP guest next week, is somebody looking for their very first PSA and the decisions that they need to make.

So what should somebody consider when they're looking for their very first PSA tool? That's a great question. And to me, it would be, well, firstly, looking at, like I said, something that's going to manage their whole business. It's going to make them efficient as an MSP throughout their entire business, especially somebody who starts right in the beginning, right? Somebody that can say, you know, I need somewhere to keep all of my, you know, all the customers, all the prospects, all the stuff I'm talking to those new customers and prospects about, somewhere, a tool that they can keep all of their, you know, their contracts in, all of those kind of things.

So they should be looking at this PSA tool of how can I efficiently run my business with a tool that is going to allow me to kind of keep everything in one place, have that single pane of glass where I can be efficient because I can directly from within the CRM, I can look at the tickets. I can see, you know, which customers have which tickets available. I can see all of the opportunities all from the same place without having to kind of flip between a million different tools to find all of that information. So I think right from the beginning, especially if you're starting out as a one or two men MSP, it's all about efficiencies and you need to have a tool that's going to make you efficient. That's a great lead into my next question.

And I'm asking these questions not because I'm choosing my first tool, but I'm thinking, I'm putting myself in the shoes of the person starting out or, you know, getting ready to implement the first PSA, right? So when you first start out, if you're a startup MSP or you're a small company and you're thinking, well, it's time to look at a PSA, do you look for one that you will grow into or do you look for one that you can already fit in comfortably and take advantage of the automation, you know, because you're small now? So do you fit into the PSA now or do you grow into it at some point in the future? And what would be the better way to go if you've got two tools and one caters to the small MSP that has everything that you need today? And the other one, you know, might be this huge beast, but, you know, it has a long history in the IT community and, you know, and everybody knows this PSA and it seems like an untamed beast for what you need right now.

Which one do you go with? Great question. And it depends, right? Now, it depends on, I guess, right in the beginning, very few people think about their growth plans. I mean, I did when I first started my MSP business, I had aspirations to grow that business big and to sell the business.

So at that point, my decision was I'm not going to go for a small PSA tool that's going to fit me now. I want a tool that's going to grow with me because I don't want to make a decision every six months or every year that I now have to look at the tool that's running my entire business and make those changes because I'm focusing on, you know, on growing my business and efficiencies and those kinds of things. And I don't have time to sit and, you know, chop and change PSA tools every six months. So but not every MSP does that, right? Some people are quite happy to kind of start small and go, well, we'll see what happens.

And, you know, maybe at some point in the future, we might grow this business. Others, and I know a lot of people, you know, they're kind of quite happy to just stay as the one and two and three main companies and quite happy to have a lifestyle business. Nothing wrong with that at all. And to those kinds of people, maybe getting a PSA tool that is designed for the small companies right now. And then if you grow at some point in the future, then you change.

That might be a good idea for them. But for me, it would be a case of really what are my plans over the next three, five and 10 years? And then say, well, if my plans are to grow big and to get a big MSP, then I'm going to choose the tool that's going to grow with me right from day one rather than change every, you know, every six months or so. Yeah, interesting, because when I first started my business and it was 16 years ago now, when I started, I had all sorts of aspirations of where my business was going to go in the different directions. And let me tell you, 16 years later, Chris, my business doesn't look anything like what I had envisioned or what I had planned.

And the serious growth, the serious growth didn't really happen until after year 10. You know, for the first 10 years, I just kind of plodded along and I had a little organic growth here and a little organic growth there. And I did fine. I don't want to say that, you know, I just was scraping by, you know, my business did fine year after year, even through some pretty awful, you know, world events. But like I said, you know, the true growth didn't happen until after my third iteration of where do I really want to take this company?

What direction do I want to go in? And I, you know, when I started 16 years ago, I thought, well, this is what I want to do over here. And then about four or five years later, I'm like, OK, well, that's not fun anymore. So what if I were to change this up and do this over here? And that worked fine for a while.

But even then, four or five years after that, I thought I really need to focus on, you know, what I want to do, what I want to accomplish. I want to standardize my offerings. You know, I really want to build a scalable practice, a scalable business. And that's when my growth really took off. And all along, I've been using the same, you know, PSA tool.

And thank goodness, because like you said, you know, I did eventually grow into it. So I can use all of the facets of the PSA tool that I'm that I'm using and have been using for the last, you know, 14 years. You know, when you're small and you're starting out and you want the shiny new object, you're hearing all of these, all of your peers talking about this new PSA tool that's coming out or this inexpensive tool that's going to that's going to wipe all of the other competitors off of the globe. What are some of the common mistakes you see when when they are choosing a tool and then, of course, when they're implementing the tool? Great question.

And this is our podcast. I'm going to shamelessly plug my book as well. So inside my book, I actually have exactly kind of almost what you've just said. And because everyone else in the industry is kind of going, well, here's the shiny new toy, the shiny new PSA tool, let's go for this one. My mom always used to say when I was growing up, if so and so puts their head into the fire, would you do the same thing?

And of course, I'd always say, well, no, of course I wouldn't. And she's like, OK, so then you've got to make your own decisions and you've got to do what everyone else isn't doing. And that's, I think, part of the problem is a lot of people are going, well, the new, you know, the new toy all of a sudden or the new shiny PSA tool is this one and everyone's talking about it. Therefore, it must be good. So I'm going to go for that.

And the mistake that people make is they go for that tool for the wrong reasons because and then it's because they they probably, you know, pissed off with one of the other tools that's that's out there. And now they they're kind of saying, well, you know, X, Y, Z tool that I'm using doesn't do this particular thing very well. So they just jump to another tool and then actually find that that tool doesn't do that thing very well either or something else that they're trying to do. It doesn't do that something else very well either. So instead of actually making the decision to say, what are my pains in my business?

What do I actually want to try and solve? And does the PSA tool that I'm about to buy solve 80 percent of of those issues that I have and not just kind of blindly run into it and go, this tool is it is not doing what I wanted to do right now. So therefore, this tool is crap, which is what I hear all the time. People go, the tool is crap. It's like, well, actually, no, it just isn't right for you at that particular time.

Or maybe it's just not addressing a particular problem, but it doesn't make the tool bad and it doesn't make the other tool that you're about to buy a great tool because there's going to be something in there that's not going to work for you. So, you know, that's such a great point. Always whenever I meet with a new client, I ask them to put together a list or three lists. List number one is the must haves. These are things you absolutely must have in order to be able to manage your business efficiently.

And that's going to be different for every company out there. List number two is it would be really nice if, but totally not deal breakers. Right. It would be great if my new shiny tool could do this, this and this. But could I live without it?

Probably. List number three is in your perfect world. Right. In your perfect world. And again, not deal breakers, but there may be some perfect little, little tip or feature that, you know, would just make it rock for you, you know, because sometimes you may actually stumble onto that perfect world item while you're looking at your must haves.

And that might kick your decision over just that little bit. So I always start with those three lists. And, you know, when you're looking at for your PSA tool, have your must have lists there because this the salesperson is going to show you all of the, you know, the shiny new features that the salesperson is designed to sell you on and they're going to sound great. But if you don't know what your must have list is, and then you're not going to have the questions to say, hey, Mr. Salesperson, does, does it do this?

Or, you know, this is really important to us. I need to be able to get this information out there. I need to be able to put this information in and stop them mid-sentence and ask them to show you where it goes. Yeah. You know, you and I have kind of very similar thoughts on exactly this.

And I do exactly the same thing, right, is I tell people to have maybe not three lists, but two lists, the kind of the absolutely must have list and the list that potentially I could do without the nice to have lists, as I call it. And then, and then you're right to go to the vendors, go to each and every single vendor of a PSA tool, you know, from the smallest one to the biggest one and say to them, this is my must have list. These are the things I absolutely have to have this PSA tool do. And don't wait for the sales guy or person to go, yes, it does that go, OK, show me how it does it, but actually show me you're doing it. Oh, my goodness.

How many salespeople have you spoken to that absolutely promise that things are there and it can be done? And then during the onboarding calls or whatever? Oh, no, we don't do that. You know, but here's a little workaround that might work for you. And I find that infuriating.

And of course, it's really not the salesperson's fault there. The salesperson's job is to try to sell you on a tool. But it's your job to know whether or not that tool is going to work in your business. Yeah, absolutely. Ultimately, the responsibility comes down to you as the business owner because it's your business.

You need to find a tool that is going to run your business and is going to work for you, not one that's going to work for everyone else. Just because, you know, tool XYZ or XYZ for our American listeners, just because that particular tool works for company ABC does not mean it's going to work for you. Right. And when I ran my MSP business, I literally I was always interested in what people were using. And I remember always asking, like, what antivirus product do you provide and what do you do this?

And I would look into all of those and then go, is this right for my clients? Is this right for me? And if if it is, then potentially I could look at it. But if not, I would make the decision to say this doesn't work for what I needed to work for. So therefore I'm going to use something different.

And it actually turned out that I used 90 percent of the tools that I used were different from every other MSP, purely because it just didn't do what what didn't work for me or didn't work for my clients. You know, I didn't just choose that tool, whatever tool it was, just because everyone else did it. Implementations, most PSAs, right, when you sign on with a PSA, most of them will force you into their implementation process. And so what's your thought? Is it better to find a a consulting expert on that tool or is it best to get the training and the onboarding from the vendor itself?

Good question, Rayanne, and I'm going to be really careful about how I answer this because I've got myself into hot water before answering this question. So so I need to be very, very careful. And again, it depends, right? Ninety nine percent of the vendors, in fact, all of the vendors that I know, certainly of the big of all of the PSA tools, in fact, have a really good implementation team. Right.

They will be able to help you to get the basics of the PSA tool set up really well. You know, they'll be able to help you with things like tax rates and they'll be able to help you with queues and statuses and all these kinds of things. So from a very base level, I think it's brilliant to go ahead with their implementation teams. But where you really need to kind of use a consultant is somebody that has industry knowledge, somebody that can say, you know what, I just help you to dial it in a little bit more and to help you to say, you know, how do I align my business processes with the PSA tool and how do I make sure that the queues and statuses and all these things I've got are actually matching the way I do my business? So I think there's nothing wrong with using the implementation teams of all of the PSA tools and some of them that I've worked with, some of the PSA tools and their implementation teams are really good.

Certainly some of the smaller PSA tools, I'm not going to mention names on the podcast, but the smaller PSA tools, their implementation teams are fantastic. And the bigger guys have a great implementation team and some of the bigger PSA vendors also have a consulting team, which again, you know, they all come from MSP backgrounds. They all understand the tool and the product and the industry fairly well. So there's nothing wrong with going down the road of getting those kinds of implementation and consulting services from the vendors as well. But what I tend to find is a lot of people want to use somebody kind of more independent because the vendors also tend to, you know, either be tied into their own specific products and try and push you down the road of their own products, whereas using somebody more independent, you kind of have, you know, knowledge and experience of the entire market and how those tools are going to fit in and integrate and implement into the PSA tool.

So it depends, is my answer. What's your take on it? Well, it's probably not a great deal different than yours. The implementation team on the PSA and in all fairness, I've done a ton of implementations on the larger PSAs and not so much on the smaller. So if there's a difference in the at the service level in the smaller PSA tools out there, I certainly don't mean to offend anybody.

But I do find generally speaking, I find that the implementation from the vendor is very cookie cutter. Like you said, they will show you how, you know, where to go to set up your agreements, where to go to set up the queues and the statuses and the work types and all of that stuff. And it's designed to, you know, show you where things are, but what they can't do is really get this thing customized to work in your business. And that's where I think the consultant comes in, because the consultant can stop long enough and say, well, let's talk about what you want this workflow to do for you, you know, and how is it going to fire? And then what is it going to do once it fires?

And then, you know, where do you want it to go or how do you want this to go? Or show me how you're invoicing your customers now and let's get it, let's get these agreements set up just the way that you want with the proper exclusions and all of that stuff. And, you know, and we can take that time to work with the MSP to really help customize it, you know, as opposed to click here, follow this wizard and and you're off and running. And I just feel like I teach courses on QuickBooks, right? And I think everybody here knows that.

So I teach courses on QuickBooks. But if somebody has never seen QuickBooks before, I'm going to send them to Bigger Brains, you know, go watch a couple of videos and get the basics. You don't need to pay me to show you where to go and write a check or how to enter a bill. You can find that video on YouTube, you know, simply by Googling it. When you really want to make this system work for you, that's when you call me, you know.

So it's probably very similar to your answer. Absolutely. And, you know, the important thing here, I think, which we're both kind of saying as well, is that from an MSP perspective, you need to invest the time and the money and the effort into actually getting these tools working. Because, you know, whether you go to the vendor to start with, you know, and you do the basic implementation with the vendor or whether you go to start on a consultant right from the beginning, it doesn't matter which way you go. The point is you need to invest the time, more importantly, and obviously the money and the effort to to get this tool dialed in correctly.

There's no point doing an implementation on a PSA tool of any kind if you're just going to follow the cookie cutter approach and just do the basics and do nothing else and then expect this tool to kind of work for you. You've got to put in the time. You've got to understand what it is that you're trying to do with the tool. What is the output? It's no point buying a tool that's going to kind of help you to run your agreements and your and your contracts and all that kind of stuff really well and then never use them because what's the point?

Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. I was talking to somebody and it wasn't that long ago and they had just gone through the the implementation team and they said this was literally their words. Five weeks of implementation and I still don't know how to use this tool. Yes, it's set up somewhat, but but we're all afraid of it. We don't know how, you know, know what to do with it.

Well, we've figured out how to make a ticket and and we can work the tickets, you know, but everything else is still a huge mystery even after the implementation. And I think that just follows exactly what you were just saying is take the time to really make sure that you understand what the tool can do for you and how it can work in your business and appoint somebody as the champion, you know, when getting this thing set up and get everybody, everybody trained on the system can't just roll it out. You need a full company buy in when you're implementing a PSA tool. Absolutely. And, you know, it comes back to what we said earlier on is, you know, as a business owner, you need to take responsibility for the tools that you're buying and making sure that the tools that you are buying are going to work for your business.

You know, you need to get to a point where if you're if you've bought a PSA tool and you've gone through an implementation, even a very basic one, and you get a month or two into the tool and still don't know how to use it, then, you know, that means you haven't really invested the time and the effort to actually get that thing working. You know, these these PSA tools aren't like in the old days when you were installing Word or Excel out of a CD and you just click next, next, next, finished and it's done and you can start using it. PSA tools aren't wizard driven to kind of help you to do these implementations. So, yeah, so you've really got to, you know, make sure you invest time and actually, especially, especially as a small one and two man band company, actually, more so you need to invest the time and the effort and the energy and the money into getting this tool working, because I would argue that, you know, from day one, you need to really start being very efficient. And as soon as you start using your your tool and, you know, you haven't got time as a small one and two man business to faff about trying to get your tool to work every 10 minutes, as well as trying to go and find new business and get customers and all these kind of things.

So you want to make sure you you invest the time and effort, get the tool working so you know it's going to be efficient. It's going to help you to run your business very successfully. And then what you want to do is go and start finding customers, start finding the business, bring those business because then you can focus on actually growing your business, knowing that your tool is actually working because you've put the time and effort into getting it working. You know, and if you think about it, I mean, you would not roll out a new RMM tool without knowing how to connect new machines, how to write the scripts, how to deploy the scripts, you know, and the policies for for each of those machines. So the PSA tool is just as important, if not more so than the RMM tool.

The RMM helps, you know, serve the clients and, you know, be able to manage all of those endpoints, you know, from one dashboard. Well, the PSA tool helps you manage all of your customers, everything else about the customers from that one dashboard. So it deserves just as much time and attention. Absolutely. Anyway, this is a fun conversation.

I can't wait for the rest of this series. So next week, we're going to talk to an MSP who is choosing their very first PSA tool and and all of the decisions that he or she could be a woman and all of the decisions that they are facing when trying to make this choice between all of the tools. So and we do have a call out. You may find us on Facebook or LinkedIn. We have a call out for any MSPs out there that are looking to hop on to the podcast with us and share your PSA story with us.

So anyway, we'd love to hear from you. And actually, you know what, Graeme, I'd actually love an MSP to come on and disagree with us and tell us we're wrong, because to say that they've done something differently or to say that it's not about efficiencies and, you know, show us how they've done things differently, because that's always fascinating to me is we kind of say, oh, you know, this this is what you really should do. But I'd love somebody to actually say, you know what, we did it completely differently and it went really smoothly or, yeah, you're right, we did it exactly like that. We didn't invest the time and effort into it and it all it all ended in tears. So so, you know, come on to the podcast, challenge us, talk to us and, you know, let's shoot the breeze.

We want to try and make these real fun sessions over the next five or six sessions that we're going to have just shooting the breeze and talking about PSA tools and talking about the trials and tribulations that you've gone through, you know, in making decisions and getting your tools working, what you love and hate about them as well. I always learn the best information from MSPs. You know, every MSP I encounter, I learn something from. So totally on board with, you know, just have it opening up the mics and and having a conversation. So I can't wait for the rest of this series.

I think it's going to be a fun one. And I know that I'm going to learn a lot. That's all I have for today. Chris, you? Yeah, absolutely.

Great fun topic. And we can talk all night about this, Rae-Ann, but I think our listeners probably don't want a five hour podcast. Oh, right. You know, we never told them that we spent the first 15 minutes before we hit record talking about it. Exactly.

And at that point, I was like, we probably should be actually putting this on air. So, yeah. So what a fun topic, Rae-Ann. And, you know, as as always, love chatting to you about PSA stuff. You know, really, as I always say, all that's left for me to say now is your PSA is the key to your MSP success.

So go out and make an impact on your world today. Thanks, Chris. See you next time. Thanks, Rae-Ann. See you next week.

Cheers. Thank you for joining us today on PSA Impact. We hope you've learned something and that you'll join us next time when we answer new questions posed by our listeners.