[22]- MSP Profitability Webinar with Rayanne and Chris

Welcome to PSA Impact, your podcast for all things PSA, RMM, and MSP, with your hosts Raeanne 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. Welcome, everyone. My name is Raeanne Buccianico, and I am here with my good friend Chris Tim.

And thank you so much for joining us for the MSP Profits and Pricing webinar that Chris and I have decided to put on today. So without any further ado, so this is me, and I'm the owner of ABC Solutions. For those of you who don't know me, ABC Solutions, we're a full-service accounting and tax firm, and we specialize in working with MSPs around the U.S. and Canada, and sometimes abroad, with some, you know, PSA consulting. And Chris, welcome, and why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are and why you're here. Hey, Raeanne.

Thanks. Thanks for the intro. Yeah, so my name is Chris Tim. I'm from a company called Sundela Consulting. We are also PSA consultants.

Just the background about myself, I ran an MSP business, and I sold that business back in 2012. And then I went to work at Autotask in the U.K., and I, you know, built their pre-sales and post-sales teams in the U.K. And then I left around three and a half years ago and started up as an MSP consultant, specializing in helping MSPs get the best out of their PSA, or specifically Autotask. So, a couple of things that we wanted to talk about today. First of all, let me tell you why we decided to put this together.

You may or may not know that Acronis has their Global Cyber Summit next week, from the 19th through the 21st, and I will be presenting a workshop, and it's going to be a hands-on workshop on improving profitability. So a lot of what you're going to see here today is going to be a bit of a preview for that workshop. So if you have not, you know, registered for the Acronis Cyber Summit, you know, consider signing up because there's going to be a ton of really, really great content. And from what I can tell, it looks like it's going to be a three-day, 24-hour event. So it's going to be, like, running all day, all night.

So no matter where you are in the world, you can pop in and see what's going on with the Cyber Summit. And then Chris also has some pretty big news, don't you, Chris? You want me to talk about that now? Well, you can mention it now and we'll talk a little bit more about it later. We'll allude to it later.

So it's all enough of profitability. For those who don't know, I've actually written a book about PSA profitability, which demonstrates, you know, how to implement a PSA tool and use it for maximum profitability. So I'm trying to hold up a picture, but I think my virtual background doesn't work too well. So what we can... Oh, there we go.

So that's the book. We'll talk about it at the end and give some links. But if anyone, you know, wants to buy that book, there will be some links to Amazon at the end. Okay. So now, enough with all of the sales pitches.

Let's get on to some serious education. So a couple of things that we want to talk about today is, you know, to improve your profitability, there's a bunch of things that go into that, right? So we need to make sure that we have the costs, you know, being tracked properly so that we know exactly how much it is costing us to provide the services. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. We're going to talk about, you know, the labor burden and calculating labor burden for your employees because we need to know how much the employees are costing, you know, in order to provide these services because all of these things kind of, you know, run together.

And then we're going to look at some profitability reports. And then Chris and I are going to have an open discussion about theories on pricing. So with that said, Chris, you want me to stop sharing so you can take over? Actually, probably best if you just keep it where it is, Rayanne, because I'm a bit nervous to put mine on. For those who've come on late, I was having problems with it, kind of doing subtitles every time I was talking and, you know, you guys would have been able to see that.

So probably best if Rayanne just controls the slides on this one. So what I want to do is talk a little bit about costs, talk about, you know, the importance of entering costs into your PSA tool and what kind of costs we need to enter. So, you know, the first thing we need to really look at is we need to look at putting in, you know, the engineer costs, which is what we call burden rates. So you know, a PSA, the way it calculates profitability is it takes the revenue and it minuses the costs and obviously that gives you the profitability. So, you know, any work that your engineers are doing that has been captured against the contract, you need to obviously take into account what those engineers are costing you.

So it's really, really important to make sure that you put those burden rates in or those engineer costs, as some PSAs call them, you know, put those into the system and make sure that they're set up accurately. So I'll go through in the next couple of slides, kind of talk about how to work those out. The other place that you really need to start getting costs into is your products and services. So you know, any of those services that you're selling on a monthly basis, so, you know, your Microsoft 365, you know, your antivirus, all of those kinds of things also need to have costs in there because again, you know, if you don't have the costs when it comes to working out their profitability, those are all going to show us as being 100% profitable, which they're not. So you know, so why are costs important?

And I think I've kind of alluded to this, you know, that profitability is determined by revenue minus costs. And you know, every time a cost changes on the system. So when, you know, Microsoft changes the cost price of those services, then you need to obviously go back in and update the PSA accordingly. Likewise, when your engineers costs change, so if you're paying, you know, more money or less money, whatever the case might be, then you need to actually go ahead and pay your engineers for that as well. So Ryan, can you just change to the next slide for me, please?

So let's look at what is burden rates, right? So the fully burden cost of the engineer, it's not just the hourly rate that you pay that engineer, right? So this includes things like I've put their social security pension in the UK, we have something called national insurance. So it's all of those kinds of things that you're paying over and above the hourly rate that takes into account working out that fully burdened rate of the engineer. Now you can get very granular with burden rates.

And I've seen this quite a few times, you know, where people work out everything right down to the nth degree, like literally, you know, working out how much a pen has cost them to supply to that engineer, you know, the desk, the computer, all of that kind of stuff. That's a huge overkill. But if you really wanted to get really, really accurate, you could work all of those out of what the real, real cost of that engineer is and put that in. The other way that I've seen a lot of MSPs calculate the burden rates rather than kind of going into, you know, working out the cost of social security and national insurance and all of these sorts of things, they just take a percentage. So normally like 20 or 30 percent and they take the hourly rate times that by 30 percent and that gives them the burden rates as well.

So there's a number of ways that you can work it out. And, you know, as I said, we'll go through and kind of show you where you can get a spreadsheet that you can go and work these out. So why is burden important? So, you know, as I've alluded to in the other slides, you need to know how much your engineers are costing you when you do work for a client and the burden rate is the cost of that engineer. So, you know, if you do one hour of work at one hundred dollars and the engineer costs you twenty dollars once you've worked up that fully burden rate, then obviously your profit is eighty dollars.

And that's a true reflection on how much that that work is worth. OK, so I think I'll pass back over to you now, Rayanne. OK, so I'm going to pick up right where you left off. And and there is this spreadsheet that I've built and you can get it at the at my website and I and you can see the link right there on. So, Chris, if you want, you could put that link right into the chat window for them and so that it would hand out the links.

Anyway, so let me just kind of walk you quickly through how to work out this burden, this labor burden rate. If you put in the monthly the monthly amount of the employee's salary, that's gross salary. Right. So and then it will calculate it up to an annual salary. So you've got your monthly and your annual columns.

And then, like Chris was saying, that there's, you know, there's more simplified method and the simplified method, you know, depends on the percentage, which is right here over on the right. Let me grab my laser pointer right here on the right. You enter in your simplified method percentage right here. And that's, you know, because most of the time I find that 30 percent is the, you know, is approximately the labor burden rate once you start adding up all of these things. So as Chris was talking about just a moment ago, you here in the U.S., we have Social Security and Medicare and unemployment taxes.

And these are the standard rates. You know, the federal rates, Social Security, Medicare and FUTA taxes. These are standard. These don't change. What might change is going to be your state unemployment tax rate.

So you can go in there and enter that now. Some people even like to include things like overhead expenses. Don't forget your workers' compensation premium, your workers' comp insurance premium and any health benefits, your retirement benefits. You know, you can stick all of those things right in here and it's going to calculate it all up for you. And it's going to come out to your fully burdened labor costs.

Right. So you can see your fifty two thousand dollar employee right here is going to cost you about seventy two thousand dollars using these actual deductions. Now, if you use the simplified method of 30 percent, you'll see that it only comes down to about sixty seven thousand six hundred dollars. So so that's an indication that these expenses down here, you know, are going to kick you up over that 30 percent limit. And if you do this with each of your employees and you see the trend that this number is much higher than 30 percent, then you can start to say, well, all right, maybe maybe it's a 32 percent burden rate or maybe we're in a 34 percent burden rate because we live in a high rent district or, you know, we we pay a lot more in benefits for our employees than the average.

So that's how you're going to can calculate your burden rate. But I want to show you a couple of other things. And this is one of my favorite reports out of my PSA and it's called the Resource Utilization Report. And you can see all of the different, you know, all of the people in your company, you know, and and this is going to show exactly how productive all of your employees are. And so what I've done is I exported this out to Excel and I turned on the heat lamp so that, you know, I can see at a glance who my productive and nonproductive employees are.

Now, I want to just caution you for a moment because, you know, just by looking at this report, it's going to show billable hours as recorded in the PSA. So if you find that you are marking down or writing down one employee's time, you know, you have to take that into consideration because that may not be, you know, apparent here. So if this person is putting in 86 percent of their time, you know, as billable on their timesheet, but you can't bill it because he or she has gone way over budget, then you need to take that into consideration. And there's a way, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, but there's a way that you can, you know, write down that time that would affect the Resource Utilization Report. And we call that client gratis hours.

And so that does come into the calculation. So, you know, when you start to, you know, do that billing offset on your time, you want to make sure you take a look at your Resource Utilization Report because not only do you have the utilization, but you also want to see how much time you're giving away gratis to your customers for that employee. Because when it comes time to make a tough decision, you need to know who your your producers are and who your producers are not. Right. So this second report down here at the bottom is, you know, is strictly a payroll report.

How much in salary am I paying? How much in taxes am I paying? You know, and what's my overall payroll cost, which is this number plus this number, you know, brings me to 165. And why is that important? Because because once I take my information from my financials down here at the bottom, you're going to see my recurring revenue and my labor revenue and my product sales and my subscription, so on and so forth.

And again, I have a heat map up here. And and let me just say that this spreadsheet is one of the sheets on that on that spreadsheet that Chris just gave you the link to. So I'm giving this out just as well. So but this is my heat map to tell me where my profitable service services are. And we're going to get into that again in a little bit later.

But I also have a calculation of my total labor costs. So I have my total labor costs here comes over here. And now I want to see what my labor is as a percentage of my total sales. Because if you start breaking out your labor into different places, some of the tax are in COGS, some of the admin is in, you know, is down below in COGS, and then the officers and then the benefits and everything spread out all over your P&L. You know, sometimes it's really difficult to figure out what your labor costs is as a percentage of revenue.

And I can tell you that it's so here we have 42 percent and it is red because that number is above 40 percent. If your labor is if your total labor cost is over 40 percent, you're going to have you're really going to struggle to make money and to be able to take a profit. So keep an eye on where your labor goes, you know, and how much of your labor cost, you know, is being is using up your income. So quick tips for measuring before I hand it back to Chris, you know, make sure that you enter all of your time and your costs accurately. Time is your widget.

And if all of your time is entered properly in your PSA, then you're going to get decent profitability reports. You know, be consistent in posting your time, revenue and expenses. Make sure they're all going to the same account month after month. Align your income and your COGS accounts. And we're going to get to that in a little while and then investigate all unexpected results.

And with that, I'm going to turn it back over to Chris. Thanks. Thanks, Ryan. And yeah, for those those UK people on the on the call, I actually have that spreadsheet that Ryan's done kind of, you know, UK funded a little bit more in terms of, you know, adding things like national insurance and pension and those kinds of things. And of course, about labor with you.

So if there's any UK people that want the UK version of that, just reach out to me afterwards and I'll make sure you get a copy of it. And I just wanted to reiterate what what you said, Ryan, about the, you know, making sure that you enter time accurately. I mean, it's it's really, really important. And, you know, for those of you who've read my book, sorry, shameless plug there again. You know, I talk about exactly the importance of adding time in in a PSA because, you know, you need to make sure that your engineers are accurately capturing as much time as they possibly can, you know, and most of the PSA tools nowadays have a timer.

So it allows that time to just tick as that work's being done and and then, you know, accurately capture that as as accurately as possible. So and also capture that time in in real time, right? Not not kind of coming back and retrospectively adding it at the end of the day or the end of the week or whatever the case might be. So what I wanted to do now is to go through some some profitability reports. And I actually want to show you how some of these would be customized and configured in in your PSA tool.

So we're actually going to go and have a look at how these are configured in in Autotask. So I know there's a lot of people on this call that may not be using Autotask, but I'm certainly going to, you know, hopefully show you in there. And I'm sure that, you know, all the other PSA tools that that you use have very similar graphs. So I'm just going to do a screen share now and I'm going to go ahead and and share my screen out. So if I say that I want to share screen one.

OK, can you guys see my screen? I'm just going to get rid of these. Yeah. So looking at this dashboard here, this is what Ryan was was talking about earlier on, and we're going to kind of start to look at things like, you know, the most profitable companies. And this is looking at most profitable companies by revenue in the last three months.

So here we can see, you know, who they are, what the amounts are. And then we can we can also kind of start to see the top revenue earners as well. So this is showing us the revenue earners for the current month. And then we can also kind of start to look at profitability by the last three months. So if we take a look at these two and we say, you know, on here we can see, you know, who those who those customers are.

We can very, very quickly and easily drill into that. And what this is going to do is it's going to give us the ability to look at how many hours we build on there and what the cost of of that work was. So this happens to be recurring services. So now we can see what the cost of those recurring services were. We can also see how many hours were built on this.

If we put any hours against this customer and then what we can start to see when we look at, you know, who those most profitable customers are, you know, we can very easily start to compare to see whether any of these customers are, you know, our most profitable one isn't necessarily our highest revenue earner. And actually, if I jump into this slide or this this dashboard that kind of shows this really nicely. So this kind of shows, you know, who our top profitable customers are. So you can see in here, you know, that we've got, you know, integrated partners and we've got these and they actually all align up. So our top revenue account here for this month is actually our most profitable as well.

But you don't often see that, right? You might see that, you know, the company that is the most profitable is going to be, you know, third or fourth down on the revenue list. And that's going to give you an indication to say, hey, I need to kind of figure out what's going on with with these customers. The other ones that I love to look at is these. So kind of your least profitable accounts.

So here you can start to see, you know, certainly in here, Dynamo Corporation is costing us money every month. So where is this coming from? We can very quickly drill into here and we can kind of start to see, you know, where this is actually coming from. And there's a perfect example is that we've only made, you know, one thousand five hundred pounds or dollars in revenue, but our costs are amounting to just over two thousand pounds in this case. So, you know, very quickly you can drill into here and you can start to see, you know, why that's the least profitable customer.

Now, one of the other things I then wanted to show you is is on the account performance tab here, we have a really good tab that we can kind of start to do exactly the same thing so we can look at the financial performance across the board of all of our customers. And this is showing, you know, what our total revenue is here to date. And you can see a really high profitability at this. So, again, this is something that you're going to want to make sure you you're looking at. You know, it's very unlikely that all of your customers are going to be 98 percent profitable.

And if they are showing as 98 percent profitable or in this case, ninety nine point nine nine percent profitable, then there's probably a problem somewhere. Right. You've probably got something that you haven't entered the costs on. You know, this should kind of start to be more along the lines of, you know, maybe 40 or 50 percent. And what we can do with this particular type of dashboard here, you know, if I type in the name of another customer, then what we can start to do is if I just do a refresh on this, what you'll actually see in here is this gives us a much clearer picture on that particular customer.

And that's more like a, you know, a good profitability percentage to have for our customers. The other thing is if you're using all the tasks, this is one of the one of my favorite widgets, because this is kind of showing you, you know, where your outstanding payments are. So which customers have I invoiced and which customers haven't haven't paid me for all of those invoices. So looking across the board, you know, I can see that there's there's eight hundred thousand pounds that hasn't yet been billed for. All I can say is I'm glad this isn't my real database because I think I'd be in a serious amount of trouble if this was my real, my real audit task.

So, Ryan, if you can share out the next slide for me, because I think there was some stuff I wanted to show on there, which I think I may have actually gone through already on this anyway. Sure, but I'm going to stop your sharing for a minute and then I'll start to share mine again. And in the meantime, we have a couple of questions that I want to I want to address. So, Odie, who I know to be a dog, so hi, Ray, Odie asks, is the 40 percent for labor cost for total sales or is it for labor sales? And so I'm happy to answer that question, but, you know, I believe it's on total sales, like all of your sales together, all of your revenue.

Your labor should not exceed 40 percent. Is that your understanding, Chris? Absolutely. And I think that's for for everything. And so the other question was, and does that 40 percent include the bookkeeper and other non-billable people or just the tax?

So I think it's going to pretty much be for everybody, right, so the 40 percent is going to include the bookkeeper as well as the tax and everybody. Exactly. Yeah, I agree. You know, all of the all of the payroll, all of the costs associated with payroll, you know, because you still need the rest of that that other 60 percent. Remember that 40 percent is just on payroll and you still have, you know, a lot of other expenses that you need to make, including taking your own your own profits out of it.

So, you know, if you can keep your payroll underneath 40 percent, I think you're in pretty good shape. So here's your next slide, Chris. OK, so I've actually been through those two. But if you can, there was one I wanted to show you in there, which actually sorry around if you can just go back into give me the ability to to share out my desktop. What I'm going to do is I want to show you another really good way of being able to get, you know, profitability based on customer and Ryan and I had this conversation the other day and I think we both agree that this is one of our favorite reports.

So if I click on the financials tab within within any client in inside Autotask, I have the ability to see the profitability by contract. So looking at this, this gives me a breakdown of every single contract for this customer so I can see up here who the customer is and I can get a breakdown of of all of the contracts. So we've got some block hours here. We've got some fixed price contracts, recurring services, et cetera, et cetera. And this gives me a really nice overview on exactly what's happening on the profitability of this customer.

So, again, you can see, you know, looking looking right down here, you know, this customer is running at around ninety nine percent profitable. So something's wrong. There's going to be a lot of times in here. Here's a perfect example. You know, there's there's some costs against this recurring service contract that is zero.

So either that means that literally nothing has been done, but we've billed for it. But there's more than likely going to be some services in there that we need to have costs centered against. And we're reflecting a zero cost against that. So this is a really, really good report that gives you the ability to see this stuff really quickly broken down by contract. And then this column here takes into account every single cost associated with delivering that contract.

So, you know, this includes your burden rates and include the costs of your services, all of that kind of stuff. And it gives you a really nice kind of profitability on that as well. So, I mean, Ryan, I know you you've used this report a few times and we we talked about this being our favorite report. I mean, do you have any comments on that? So so the other the previous screen just before this one, can you go back to that?

I'll show you one of my favorite reports. Where did you go into the customer and then go to financials? So the profitability by month is another one of my favorites because this helps me see some trends. And so now I can see, you know, especially on the break fix customers, you know, if you still have any break fix people left, you know, if you want to see, you know, exactly how much money they're spending with you and how much you're making, you know, on them, you know, before the the contract is up or just, you know, to see what kind, you know, what kind of revenue they're bringing in. You know, this is one of my favorite screens because this kind of captures everything that Chris just showed, you know, with the breakout of the different contracts.

But this just brings all of it into one simple place so that you can see them on side by side. So I would absolutely use both of them together or in conjunction with each other. Absolutely. And, you know, you you were talking about, you know, a few moments ago about that break fix customers. And so on this report down here, you can see where it says no contract.

So, you know, where it's showing no contract, this is where you've either got break fix work or you've got some work that's been excluded against the contract. So it kind of shows us as not included in the contract. So this is a really good example in here to see, you know, some of that break fix rates. So a combination of this report that gives you the profitability broken down on a contract by contract basis and that monthly report that Rayanne was was talking about. You know, these two are going to give you a really good picture of of the overall profitability of your customer.

So I'll pass back over to you now, Rayanne. Sure. And of course, we have a couple of more questions on on the screen while I am sharing my screen. So give me one second to share and then then we'll get into our open conversation on pricing. But before we do that, Odi asks, after paying the owner and customer service manager, what is a reasonable net income as a percentage of total income?

Now, I have I have an answer to this. Do you have one? I think I'm going to defer back to you being the being the accountant. So so here's my thought on that, Odi, is that at the end of the day, after all of the expenses are paid, you should still have, you know, you should still have a minimum of 10 percent left in that income, because if you are working for less than 10 cents on the dollar, then you're you know, what are you doing it all for? Right.

So you want to make sure that you still have, you know, plenty of money left in profit over and above your your compensation because you're being compensated for the work you do. The profit is your is your compensation for being the business owner and putting up with all of the, dare I say, headaches of owning a business. Right. So you want to make it worth your while. Minimum 10 percent, you know, a number to shoot for is going to be somewhere between 15 and 20 percent.

Best in class, you're going to be at the 25 percent. And I do see some people, some MSPs out there who managed to make the 25 percent net income, the net income profit. So a couple of other questions and thoughts on that, Chris. Yeah, well, I was actually going to say I see that there's a question here around capturing time for an office admin. So, you know, I can take that one.

So the question was, we've always struggled to capture our time against tickets. We have an office admin time entry that we use to fill out our timesheets. This obviously skews the per customer profitability reports. Any tips on how to solve this issue? Almost all of our customers are recurring services.

Well, the first thing is, if that's an office admin account or that that's actually filling in the time, I would assume that you've probably put that in as a non-billable time entry or a non-billable work type. And if that's the case, then then, yeah, all that work that they're doing is going to show as as non-billable. It's really important, even if you've got a contract on, you know, for your customers, it's really, really important to make sure that your engineers are the ones entering the time and that they're entering it with a billable work type if they're actually doing any kind of billable work. And then, you know, obviously, if they are doing any kind of work that potentially you wouldn't be billing for, so maybe like research or some kind of thing like that, then you could use a non-billable work type. But, you know, it's important to make sure that that every single engineer is capturing their time properly and not getting the the office admin to capture it because the office admin, you know, isn't necessarily going to know how much time each of those engineers have have spent.

And also, if if it is the office admin that's that's doing it to make sure that, you know, your engineers submit the the correct amount of time to that office admin person and that, you know, that person then uses the, you know, the correct work types, which will then either be included or excluded against against the contract. So I hope that's kind of answered that question for you. Can I jump in on that one, too? Yeah, sure. Because I read that question a little bit differently.

I read that as the office admin is is a time plug. Right. So the people, you know, the technicians are entering their time into tickets and then by the end of the day, they only have six hours of time and then they know that they've been there for eight hours. So they plug the remaining two hours into office admin because they don't know, you know, what what they've done. And so my my response to that is, you know, and that's what the resource utilization report is really, really going to highlight, Justin, because when you start to run that that utilization report, you're going to see that, you know, 20 percent or 30 percent of their time, you know, is being plugged into office admin.

That's a great opener for us. Hey, what what have you done this week? Or, you know, why do you know you've been here 40 hours, but yet you only have 30 billable hours on your time sheet. You're not you know, you're not expected to do any admin work. Right.

These are technicians. They should be working and all of their time should be on tickets. So, you know, either they're doing work and they're not opening up a ticket, which is going to, you know, which is going to skew your profitability reports for the customer, even if they're just checking a backup or, you know, running patches or, you know, something like that. And they just fail to open a ticket because it's one of those things they do, you know, daily or weekly and they never even considered it. So one of the things that I do is I create a ticket, you know, for each month and and we call it like our catch all ticket so that so that the tech doesn't have to create a new ticket just to enter five minutes of time for running a patch or checking a backup, you know, so just have that ticket sitting there in the queue and they can just quickly grab it, throw it in their work list and and turn it on and turn it off when they're, you know, when they're doing simple tasks for customers.

Ryan, if I can jump in again here, so I think what you were saying there is, is, you know, if that office admin type work that you were just referring to on that ticket that you've got, you know, I'm assuming that's logged against your own company, right? So if they log in time against that, then then they log in time against your company and not against the customer that it should be. So I would, we keep, we keep a catch all ticket for each customer, for every customer. OK, so I mean, the way I would do it anyway for for kind of office admin type type work is, you know, I would use that as the kind of new or going to the regular time to go into the time sheets and capture that as regular time, which is going to capture internal time, right? That's going to say I was in a meeting or I was doing something and that's going to be captured as internal time.

That's not necessarily associated against any customer, but any work or time that you're entering on for a customer specifically should be logged against that customer and should be logged as a, well, you know, a billable or non-billable time entry based on on what it is. But it's really, really important to make sure that it's being captured against the right customer, you know, all the time rather than against an internal company. Yeah, and that's another really good point, too, is that, you know, those internal those internal codes, you know, like, you know, internal meeting, scrum, you know, actual admin or office time, sales time, marketing time, you know, split that out so that you can see, you know, where your people are doing the work as opposed to having that one catch all plug work type, you know, or because when they go into their timesheet, you know, and and create that general time, like you were saying, you can choose the different, you know, the different types of internal work like Chris was just saying. So, you know, if you're a little bit more descriptive in your list of internal work codes, then you might get better, even more information out of it. Yeah, absolutely.

And I think, you know, the yeah, Justin just answered that saying it was I can't remember. I clicked on it to say answer. Yeah, so I think he was saying you were right. It's basically the filler that they were using rather than than the way I was explaining it. So, yeah.

So, Chris, I'm going to open this the rest of this up for, you know, more of a one on one conversation, because I get this question a lot, pricing, you know, and I have a few theories on pricing, you know, so if you determine the cost of the products and services that you're selling, and then you figure out how much of a margin or profit you want to make on those costs, then you can gross that up, you know, times it by multiplied by the number of units and then and then come out to your cost, you know, so that spreadsheet that once again, you know, because you'll find that that spreadsheet has a number of tabs and one of them is a pricing tab. So you can fill out the information on this, you know, and it's it's very simple. It's not overly complicated. You put in the numbers, you know, into the boxes, and then the calculations will do themselves. You know, if you're looking for a quick and easy way, you know, to do, let's say, and, you know, an all in seat price, you know, for, you know, so you get all of the costs for, you know, for the unit or the device that you're going to be managing, you know, put the costs in, you know, don't forget to put in the number of hours that you expect to spend per unit, you know, and it will calculate out, you know, what that unit price needs to be in order for you to get the profit margin that you're looking for.

So this spreadsheet is on there. So that's one of the that's one of the theories that I use. What you know, what are some of the things that you've done to help MSPs with their pricing? Yes, I really like what you've done there with that spreadsheet. I think that's a really good way to kind of work that stuff out.

Right. So is to to kind of total up everything that you're selling on a on a monthly basis, you know, and then and then work out that that cost to get to get those costs or that that pricing accurately. I hear a lot of MSPs ask me about how to price up their services. Right. What is the what should I be including in the in the contract?

What shouldn't I be including all of that kind of thing? And, you know, that's a that's a big subject on its own in terms of of, you know, figuring out how much you should be charging per seat or per per customer or per, you know, per device, whatever it is that that that you're charging. And I think, you know, looking at what you've done here is a really good way to work that out. And is to say, you know, look at every single, you know, item that you're actually selling to the customer. So you've got in there, you know, Office 365 and the remote management and everything that you're providing, as well as any of that remedial work.

Right. So things that you're you're, you know, all the maintenance that you're actually doing on a on a monthly basis to figure out how much time it takes you to do that. So, you know, doing a disk cleanup is maybe, you know, half an hour or so per month. It's going to take you to do that kind of work, you know, and and work out how long it takes you to do those remedial tasks and factor that in as well. So when you're building the the price per, you know, per user, you can build in not only the price of of each of these, you know, items that you're selling.

So the antivirus and Office 365, but also, you know, factor in how long it takes you to actually support that customer or that user on a on a monthly basis as well. Yeah. Oh, and can we have a question on the screen? And Jay asked about this document being on. No, it's not ABC Solutions dot com.

It's ABC Solutions, FL dot com slash resources. ABC Solutions dot com is not me. That is some company, I think, out in the state of Washington. I don't know. So so if that link that Chris put up a short while ago.

I've just put it back in there. So if you look in the chat, I've sent it to all panelists and attendees. There's a ABC Solutions, FL dot com forward slash resources. And for those of you that made it to the right website, let me just say that at the very top of that resources page, you're going to see a bunch of COVID-19 and CARES Act documents that I put up. Scroll down past that and you'll see ABC's ABC original documents.

And so that's where you will find my labor burden and pricing spreadsheet available. Yeah. Rayan, I don't know if you just want to maybe share out that website so we can show folks where it is or. Sure. As a matter of fact, it's.

Yeah. And. Hang on. There you go. Right.

So here's my COVID-19 at ABC Solutions, FL dot com slash resources. And then I and here's a bunch of documents. Here's the labor pricing worksheets. And I've got a bunch of other documents in there, too. So like I have a sample chart of accounts.

We were talking about that profitability section where you want to separate out your, you know, your different revenue buckets and then have your cost of goods sold accounts actually mirror that. So you can just take a quick peek at a glance and say, you know, and make sure that your margins are right on target where they need to be. So are there any other questions or should we begin the wrap up, Chris? I'm just going to have a quick look at the questions. I think that is.

Yep. That's all the questions I can see that have been answered. So do you want me to take this one, Rayanne? Sure. Yeah.

Yeah. So so on the slide, you can see we've put up here the the podcast. So I'm sure we we have a few people on this call that are our listeners. So Rayanne and I run a podcast which normally goes out what every couple of weeks or so on a Wednesday. It's PSA Impact and it's a podcast on all things PSA and RMM where Rayanne and I talk about, you know, various topics around, you know, how to configure your PSA and your RMM, as well as things like we're talking about now in terms of profitability, all of those sorts of things.

So it's available on all the podcast catches or you can get it at PSA Impact dot net. And Rayanne, I think we said we were going to actually turn this webinar into a podcast after this. So, you know, if you guys want to listen again, we'll obviously send the recording anyway. But if you do want to listen again, it will be up as a as a podcast soon after the session today. Yep.

Awesome. And also one of one of the questions was wondering whether we could do one of these just for Autotask tuning. So maybe you and I can talk about that on another episode. Yeah, I'd love to do that. I mean, we can either do that as a as another webinar or or potentially as a as a podcast.

So, yeah, we'll reach out separately on on that one. And yeah, let's absolutely put something together with that. So a few days ago, I thought I was talking to somebody and your book came up, PSA profitability. And and they were like, well, where can I get this? So I went and I Googled PSA profitability.

And sure enough, your book came straight up, you know, with Amazon. But then I saw the website that goes with it. So I sent them to your website to purchase the book directly from the website. So. So apparently you can buy it either on Amazon or from your website directly.

Is that true? It is. Yeah. And and thank you for letting me talk about the book, Graham. I really appreciate it.

So, yes, the you can get it directly on Amazon on one of those links. And or if you go to the book website, to be honest with you, all the book website's going to do is take you to a link to Amazon. And and full disclosure, those are my affiliate links. So you obviously don't have to use those particular links. I would really appreciate it if you did, though.

But yeah, you can you can go to either those two links that we've put up there or or you can just go to the book website, which is PSA profitability dot com. And you can go ahead and buy it directly from there as well. There is also an option if you want me to sign a copy for you, there is an option where you can buy a signed copy. And I'll actually I've got loads of them here that I need to need to get rid of because I ordered a whole bunch of them. So if you want me to sign it for you, I'll be more than happy to do that.

There is something on the website that you can you can order a signed copy. Oh, by the way, and thanks for my signed copy. I got it last week. So what it says that his sonic wall detects a botnet on PSA impact that net. However, I just went to our website and and it is up and running.

So I'm not sure what that was about. And Justin asked whether we recommend the Kindle or the paper version of the book. I'm a Kindle reader, so it's because I'm a nighttime reader and and I can't fall asleep with the lights on and I can't read a book if the lights not on. So so I'm definitely a Kindle reader. I think that's a personal preference.

Do you do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, so weirdly enough, though, actually looking at the sales on on Amazon, it seems that the Kindle is is the clear winner. I think most people buy it on the Kindle. You know, I think a lot of people have, you know, paperbacks are kind of heavy, although it's not that big. There's only sort of about 130 odd pages.

So it's not a huge book, but it's personal preference. They're both just as readable. Some people like the paperback. I'm a person that loves paperbacks purely because I can then mark things up and I can scribble in it and and do all these things. And I'm just a little bit old school like that as well.

I still write things down on a piece of paper as well. So, yeah, so I like the paperback, but it's entirely up to you. You know, it also depends on which country you're in. I know that, for example, in Australia, they can't get the paperback version on Amazon, so they have to buy the Kindle version. But, you know, in the in the US and the UK and Europe and things, you know, the paperbacks readily available.

So whatever is your your choice, it's entirely up to you. All right. So if it's OK, I'm just going to take a few minutes to plug my workshop with the Acronis Cyber Summit that's next week. It's a 90 minute workshop and where we and I really encourage and by the way, if there's anybody here that wants to do one on one work with me during the workshop, if you're willing to share things like your chart of accounts, you know, your questions, your concerns, you know, where we will work through them together, please, please reach out because I can just bring you right up on stage with me and we can share your your questions. And and work through them together.

But so the object is we're going to start by taking a look at the chart of accounts, showing you how to measure your profitability, what KPIs you should be running on a regular basis. And and also, you know, five, you know, five quick sanity checks that you can use, you know, to make sure that your business is staying on track. So it's a 90 minute hands on workshop. This is not just by PowerPoint for 90 minutes next week. It is actually going to be a workshop.

So, you know, bring your P&L, your chart of accounts, your your cash flow statement and and let's get some work done. And with that, I really just want to say thank you to everybody who who joined us today. You know, my name's Rayanne. I'm with ABC Solutions. We're in Clearwater, Florida.

And and thanks so much, Chris, for all of your your contributions today. If you want to give one last plug. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, Rayanne. Thanks for inviting me on on this webinar.

It's it's really good to to, you know, do something with you again. So, yeah, my name's Chris Tim. My company is Sondella Consulting dot com. And I'm based in India. So, you know, anyone who wants to reach out to me, you those those are my details either directly from an email or just, you know, go to the website and leave a contact us.

So and thanks, Rayanne, for for having me on this. Thank you again. And thanks again, everybody. So Kate looks like Katie wants a link in the chat. What link did you want, Katie?

Was it for the the summit or for the book? For the virtual event. Give me one second. It is at. Yes, we go.

So Adam's asking where is the summit? It's it's online, right? It's virtual. Yeah, it's right online. And so you can get to it by at Acronis dot events.

Thanks, Brian. And yes, you will all get a copy of the presentation as well as a link to the recording. We'll get that sent out hopefully for the end of the day. Thanks again, everyone. And I'm going to stop the recording, but I might stick around for a minute or two to answer questions.

Yeah, I'll stick around with you, Rayanne. 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.