MSP Teams in the SMB
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If the company was only charging $125/hr, or $1,000 for an entire day, as a total number, that's not all that much at all. That's Best Buy / Geek Squad numbers. They literally charge around $125/hr and pay around $12.50 / hour. But they have loads of costs on top of that, so their profits are nowhere near $900. There is a base overhead of costs for insurance, billing, taxes, etc. If $125/hr is the total amount, that owner was not making much money. Some, certainly, but not a lot.
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@scottalanmiller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
If the company was only charging $125/hr, or $1,000 for an entire day, as a total number, that's not all that much at all. That's Best Buy / Geek Squad numbers. They literally charge around $125/hr and pay around $12.50 / hour. But they have loads of costs on top of that, so their profits are nowhere near $900. There is a base overhead of costs for insurance, billing, taxes, etc. If $125/hr is the total amount, that owner was not making much money. Some, certainly, but not a lot.
Exactly - so I'm just wanting to make sure @Carnival-Boy understands that just because he sees a huge (to him) bill going to the client, and he's getting a small portion of it, that the company still has a ton of overhead costs that that money has to pay for.
Let's not forget that you probably get paid wither you are working on a client job or not, so they need to charge more so they have money left over to pay you in the time you're not billing.
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$1000 revenue, not profit.
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
$1000 revenue, not profit.
$1,000 in revenue is nothing, no one was getting rich off of that. That's $125/hr.
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I disagree, but let's not get bogged down in specific numbers, it was a long time ago and costs are very different between the US and Europe.
Does anyone else on ML work for an SMB and employ internal IT staff or am I the only one? I'd like some support
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
Does anyone else on ML work for an SMB and employ internal IT staff or am I the only one? I'd like some support
Most everyone IS the internal staff, rather than the hirer of that staff, you are somewhat unique there, very few of them are managers or hirers. But they don't want their numbers being run against an MSP
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
I disagree, but let's not get bogged down in specific numbers, it was a long time ago and costs are very different between the US and Europe.
Without those numbers no one can really have a real discussion.
Does anyone else on ML work for an SMB and employ internal IT staff or am I the only one? I'd like some support
I work for a SMB and I am an internal IT staff member - I'm the classic one man IT shop.
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And do you think you offer good value to your company or do you think they'd be better off outsourcing your position?
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If someone has internal staff and wants to do an MSP cost comparison, that would be interesting. However it is SUPER hard to do unless you want to do a direct replacement, which we have done before and saved the company money because they couldn't hire the same quality of people that we could as an MSP because we have better career prospects, because an MSP works totally differently, needs to assess how the internal staff is being used inefficiently and generally is asked to do drastically more than internal IT was asked to do. So the costs often go up, because much more work is being done.
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@scottalanmiller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
If someone has internal staff and wants to do an MSP cost comparison, that would be interesting. However it is SUPER hard to do unless you want to do a direct replacement, which we have done before and saved the company money because they couldn't hire the same quality of people that we could as an MSP because we have better career prospects, because an MSP works totally differently, needs to assess how the internal staff is being used inefficiently and generally is asked to do drastically more than internal IT was asked to do. So the costs often go up, because much more work is being done.
Exactly.
Also companies that employee MSPs typically understand the importance of IT, and have a better chance that they will do things right. Of course this requires that they choose a good MSP, because as much as a good MSP can help, a bad one can kill their company. -
@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
And do you think you offer good value to your company or do you think they'd be better off outsourcing your position?
I'd argue that we can prove this in this simple way...
His position could be outsourced to an MSP. The customer could request him back as a full time resource. His cost to the company would be essentially the same, but with the benefit of the MSP infrastructure. No real change in cost, but with improvement in working arrangement. Any additional variation made to that, moving him to part time, bringing in other resources, would all be done solely because they were evaluated as being additionally beneficial.
Basically, if you need traditional resources, MSPs can do that as well as in house staffing (we've proven this in the real world, it's dollar for dollar the same) but the moment you need anything different than that, MSPs offer value you can't get any other way. So it's always break even... or better.
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@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
@scottalanmiller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
If someone has internal staff and wants to do an MSP cost comparison, that would be interesting. However it is SUPER hard to do unless you want to do a direct replacement, which we have done before and saved the company money because they couldn't hire the same quality of people that we could as an MSP because we have better career prospects, because an MSP works totally differently, needs to assess how the internal staff is being used inefficiently and generally is asked to do drastically more than internal IT was asked to do. So the costs often go up, because much more work is being done.
Exactly.
Also companies that employee MSPs typically understand the importance of IT, and have a better chance that they will do things right. Of course this requires that they choose a good MSP, because as much as a good MSP can help, a bad one can kill their company.True, but it is easier to get a good MSP than a good employee. Neither is easy, but one has a better chance.
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
Is that a good idea? I dunno, I've never ran the figures, but I'm not sure you have either so who can say MSPs are always better?
@scottalanmiller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
If someone has internal staff and wants to do an MSP cost comparison, that would be interesting. However it is SUPER hard to do unless you want to do a direct replacement
I consider these two statements basically the same. Maybe there's some confusion here. I took your opening post to be about having multiple specialists (a SQL guy, a UNIX guy, a SAN guy) working for an organisation on an as and when basis, versus having a small number of dedicated generalists. Is that right?
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
Maybe there's some confusion here. I took your opening post to be about having multiple specialists (a SQL guy, a UNIX guy, a SAN guy) working for an organisation on an as and when basis, versus having a small number of dedicated generalists. Is that right?
An MSP could, perhaps should, have all of the above.
The generalist take care of the day to day helpdesk type situations. They are the first line of defense at the MSP, you call because you can't print, they help you. The specialist are who are managing and supporting things like Exchange - OK not really because any MSP worth its salt should be pushing all customers to hosted email solutions, and not ones they are hosting.
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I stopped by my upstairs neighbors place in my office. They used to have an MSP handle their stuff. They dumped them after the MSP sent a tech who sat at their office for nearly 16 hours doing nearly nothing, my contact told me the tech was literally twiddling his thumbs. When my contact asked when it would be fix, the guy jumped to, and 30 mins later it was fixed and he left.
The MSP then billed that client for the 16 hours of the tech being there.
I have no additional details, but the client was pretty unhappy to see a tech just sitting there basically doing nothing, not typing, not searching the internet for fixes, just sitting for nearly 2 days, then suddenly, when asked when it will be fixed, hopping to and fixing it.
As Scott mentioned this was clearly and hourly bill situation, not a monthly contract (at least not a contract for break/fix - I do know they had a monthly reoccurring cost for things like backups on the server, and network monitoring).
This is clearly an example of a bad MSP - or at minimum a bad employee at an MSP.
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@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
This is clearly an example of a bad MSP - or at minimum a bad employee at an MSP.
Bad employees are everywhere. it is how the MSP chose to handle it that would say is it was a bad MSP.
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@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
@Carnival-Boy said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
Is that a good idea? I dunno, I've never ran the figures, but I'm not sure you have either so who can say MSPs are always better?
@scottalanmiller said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
If someone has internal staff and wants to do an MSP cost comparison, that would be interesting. However it is SUPER hard to do unless you want to do a direct replacement
I consider these two statements basically the same. Maybe there's some confusion here. I took your opening post to be about having multiple specialists (a SQL guy, a UNIX guy, a SAN guy) working for an organisation on an as and when basis, versus having a small number of dedicated generalists. Is that right?
Mostly correct. But I think it is two unique things. Let me make two more "thought out" statements.
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I believe that the "dedicated IT organization" is better than the "IT department reporting to a non-IT organization" model. Meaning, if you (or any IT person) was to be moved from an internal role to a totally apples to apples role in an MSP/ITSP/DITO and sold back one to one to your old company, that this should be beneficial to everyone. Generalists can be maintained, but improved.
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I believe that generalists should be very rare and mostly in management or oversight roles. So moving to any structure, DITO or NONDITO, where there is specialties doing the "work" and a generalist doing the "oversight" is beneficial. Fortune 1000s do this with internal IT, MSPs can bring this to SMBs.
So I think that there are two benefits here, structure of management and structure of roles. MSPs improve both, but they are two different aspects. Each is, I believe, beneficial on its own, but together become even better.
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@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
The generalist take care of the day to day helpdesk type situations. They are the first line of defense at the MSP, you call because you can't print, they help you. The specialist are who are managing and supporting things like Exchange ...
I'd say the opposite. Ideally, and only ideally, specialists would handle all day to day (generalists L0 would handle ticket routing, but not the servicing) and generalists only brought in when you need a cross-discipline oversight.
Even desktop support people are specialists (or should be in this example.) For example, your desktop guy might be a specialist in local Windows 10 administration (local meaning NOT the guy doing Group Policy setup, not imaging, etc.) and MS Office and a few common apps used in your environment so that he can sit with the users at their desks and fix or train them.
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@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
I stopped by my upstairs neighbors place in my office. They used to have an MSP handle their stuff. They dumped them after the MSP sent a tech who sat at their office for nearly 16 hours doing nearly nothing, my contact told me the tech was literally twiddling his thumbs. When my contact asked when it would be fix, the guy jumped to, and 30 mins later it was fixed and he left.
The MSP then billed that client for the 16 hours of the tech being there.
I have no additional details, but the client was pretty unhappy to see a tech just sitting there basically doing nothing, not typing, not searching the internet for fixes, just sitting for nearly 2 days, then suddenly, when asked when it will be fixed, hopping to and fixing it.
As Scott mentioned this was clearly and hourly bill situation, not a monthly contract (at least not a contract for break/fix - I do know they had a monthly reoccurring cost for things like backups on the server, and network monitoring).
This is clearly an example of a bad MSP - or at minimum a bad employee at an MSP.
Well, there is a bit of assumption there. What if that guy was busting hump for sixteen hours, knew what the issue was, had the fix underway, was waiting on a system to finish a reboot or update that had 30 minutes left and just happened to get asked how long it would be at the end after having done an excellent job for two days. We are assuming that he was twiddling his thumbs for two days, and likely that is true, but unless they really checked up, there is a ton of room for error there. What if that was an internal IT guy, would they have reacted the same? If not, why not? Internal IT staff are generally hourly as well, same factors.
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@JaredBusch said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
@Dashrender said in MSP Teams in the SMB:
This is clearly an example of a bad MSP - or at minimum a bad employee at an MSP.
Bad employees are everywhere. it is how the MSP chose to handle it that would say is it was a bad MSP.
Yup, I see so many bad people on both sides. The nice thing about working with an MSP is that there are more ways to handle it, more flexibility. We replace bad MSPs and bad internal people all the time. MSPs tend to get swapped out rapidly because it's easier to do so, so people tend to accumulate more stories about them. But more often than not, when we find companies with bad MSP horror stories, we also figure out why - because the client is a nightmare that won't pay their bills, refuses to listen, doesn't let the MSP do their jobs, etc. So suddenly you realize that the stories of most of the "other" MSPs are often made up or exaggerated. They didn't maintain that Exchange server for three years? That's because they weren't paid to do so and the customer refused service. The stories of "old IT" are not very reliable.
