KPIs Part 2: Use Your RMM to Print Money and Prevent Fires

The whole point of being a managed service provider is to proactively manage IT. Rather than paying you to fix something every time it breaks, your clients pay you every month to make sure nothing breaks in the first place. They need you to actively prevent emergencies rather than reacting to them.

In case you missed it...

In part 1 of our series on KPIs, we said a key performance indicator (KPI) is a metric that can be used to predict or measure something critical taking place in an organization.

You’ve got data in your Remote Monitoring and Management platform (RMM) about your clients’ environment. Why not use it? Take for example hardware lifecycles. Let’s explore how it can provide valuable insight for unlocking revenue potential.

I often provide sales training to MSPs in the $200 to $500K a year range who are pushing hard to get to the next level. A recurring theme I’ve noticed is that they commonly spend an inordinate amount of time reacting to emergencies.

They are trapped in a cycle of firefighting, which is consuming their resources. It’s no surprise really, as there are so many emergencies which can occur, and without leveraging data it may seem impossible to predict them all.

I like to ask the question, “What could we have done to predict this critical ticket?”.

Of course, usually the answer is, “Nothing. There's nothing I could have done”.

It’s not until we start collecting, analyzing key performance indicators and establishing metrics, that we start to expose patterns and create for ourselves some predictability for our IT support team.

When a workstation hits five years old, it's probability of power supply or hard drive failure increases dramatically, right?

If an IT provider were to sell and install 60 workstations at the same time, they’d all hit that 5 year milestone at roughly the same time. It’s logical to expect that we should start seeing, a higher influx of support tickets from those users. Those aging workstations have reached a risk threshold, and perhaps we need to start putting a lifecycle management strategy into place.

A past CEO of mine used to call this “printing money” because it was the most reliable thing that we did as an IT provider for contract renewals and hardware sales.

While this is a simple example, it offers insight into what else is possible using the right data. Think software patching, system resources, security events, and more.

Here are a few resources to get you going:

• 10 managed service provider (MSP) metrics & KPIs to track
• Going Beyond RMM for the Next Level of IT Service Management
• IT asset lifecycle management: definition, stages, and more