Chris Timm on PSA Tools and MSP Profitability | Acronis CyberFit Summit

hi everyone James here from lynnode I'm here in the uh beautiful but slightly tropical Miami for the acronis cyberfit summit I've been wandering around learning Lots having lots of great chats and I stumbled into the uh something of a PSA Guru Chris Timm Chris how you doing do you want to give us a quick intro let us know who who you are and what you do hey James uh thanks for having me yes my name's Chris Timm I'm a PSA consultant xmsp business owner and I help msps to get the best out of uh out of all the tasks and and PSA tools and uh I'm a published author wrote the book on PSA profitability fantastic thank you for joining me this has been one of the more crazy interviews you'll probably ever do in the fact that we've been running in and out Refresh on a hide from the storm that may or may not blow us away yeah absolutely it's uh it's one of those uh one of those days it's raining really hard I was told Miami was this warm place and I come here and it's like being in the UK so yeah we've absolutely been missiled so moving on then I'd love to pick your brains obviously you've got a wealth of knowledge to tell us about sort of PSAs and how to enhance profit profitability in this short video do you mind just giving us a few tips that msps can take away and maybe action straight away that will improve their profitability within their business yeah sure so so the first one I would say is absolutely make sure you get all the costs into the PSA so things like the cost of the services that you're selling so Microsoft 365. those kind of things make sure those costs are in the system um the the other tip I would give is to make sure that the um the cost of your engineers is in the system as well so making sure you've got their Burden rate entered in um that way when you start to log time against the ticket you can actually um you know see how much their their Engineers time is costing and that's ultimately going to help you with um with profitability and then tip number three is you know it's all very well getting all these costs into the system um that obviously now you need to put in whatever the price that you're selling it at and making sure that those prices your sale price and your cost price are adjusted accordingly so every time Microsoft increases or decreases the price of Microsoft 365 licenses make sure you go into your PSA and adjust that accordingly likewise make sure that you're always adjusting the price of the um or cost of the engineer so that every time um you know they're getting a pay rise or something like that you're putting their Burden rate into the system and that way all the tasks would then be able to work out what all of your revenue is once you build everything through the system what the revenue is minus all of those costs and that's going to give you your profitability that's fantastic so um so in terms of sort of in terms of the first things that uh that an MSP should think about then is that is that what you'd say they are the first steps certainly from a profitability perspective right um so you know in order to get yourself to a point where you um you know where you're getting all that profitability information out so you want to know who you're most profitable or these profitable customers you need to have that stuff entered into the system um and obviously you need to make sure then that you're billing through the PSA as well right that you actually um running those invoices through the PSA system and then pushing those into your um your accounting tool whatever that accounting tool is that you use and so once you've got all this information in the PSA I have to ask then what's what are the useful reports that I should point out by the way PSA Professional Services automation tool yeah so what what are the reports that you want to be looking at then if you just you're just starting out you've just got these basic costs in you're not going full blown yet what are the kind of reports and the sort of the things you should have on there what are the key things you should look for straight away well certainly the key ones that most PSA tools will give you is um uh you know who your most profitable customer is who your least profitable customers um and then you know your highest revenue earner so and your lowest Revenue earner and it's always interesting to run those reports because very often your highest revenue earner is not necessarily always your most profitable so those are the kinds of reports I would definitely recommend that somebody runs and most PSA tools are going to give you the ability to do that and at that point you've got some decisions to make right so if you've got some customers that perhaps aren't earning you what you'd expect or you're investing too much time in them then you've got some decisions and likewise if you have some more profitable customers and you invest more time in kind of nurturing those yeah I mean and those reports are going to give you that information right so if you've got the cost of the engineer you know you might have one of your most expensive Engineers always doing the work for that particular customer so that's going to give you the decision to make to say well do I always keep using that more expensive engine out or do I need to use a less expensive engineer or do I get that expensive engineer to just do less time less less hours with that customer so yeah so those are the kinds of decisions you you can you can make with those kinds of reports brilliant the main thing is that get that information in there so you've got the information to work with and then you can make some decisions based on that yeah absolutely I mean if you have no costs in the system then obviously the reports are going to show 100 profitable right because there's nothing forward to base um all that profitability on right because it's going to just look at Revenue minus costs and if the costs are all zero then 100 yeah maybe something in denial wouldn't you exactly brilliant okay so it's obviously a huge topic and we've just literally skimmed the surface can you let our audience know if they'd like to know more about how to get the most out of their PSA Tool uh how to contact you what sort of services you offer personally yep so I'm on all the socials uh LinkedIn Twitter um you can also contact me directly from um either psaprofitability.com which is the the book that I wrote or um via sundelicansulting.com brilliant Chris pleasure talking to you hopefully we can do it again maybe a longer webinar or something along those lines in the future soon yeah I'd love that thanks thanks for having me and uh we better get back inside before we get blown away yeah let's do that while we're safe thanks for watching cheers [Music]