Professionalism In Your MSP - The Small Things in 2024

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Professionalism and your MSP is the subject of today's article. I used to own and operate my own MSP from 2000 through to around 2012 and back then IT services were not quite as important in business as they are today and I suppose our industry like many started with a bunch of guys who woke up one day and decided to fill a gap in the market.

There was less regulation because even as late as 2008, an organization's IT infrastructure was classed as a bit of a novelty and if it was not completely on point then no problems.

Things certainly have changed, I.T services are vital to organizations of all sizes and while there is a lot more regulation these days, my view is that there probably needs to be more. We are not playing games anymore, an organization's data is their most valuable asset.

I will go into how MSP organizations can improve their professionalism through structured documentation and processes along with a few other pointers that can help give the perception that you are running an outstanding organization.

While you are here, Take a look at some of our other IT Project And Consulting related articles below that may interest you:

MSP Professionalism Over Time

As mentioned above and like any emerging industry, people start it because it fills a void in the marketplace. When I began my MSP in around 2000, they were a fairly new business model, sure you could probably pinpoint a time back in the late 70s to the first actual MSP however they did not really reach the business worlds consciousness until the mid 90s.

When you start something that is new in an emerging industry, there is never going to be a framework, regulation or laws in place to account for things. To be brutally honest back then it was like the wild west. It was a best effort kind of deal.

Of course now, businesses in general rely heavily on IT service companies. When I started, the only professionalism there was within an MSP was gained internally via the integrity and ethos of the person running the business.

No guidelines or instruction guides, there were no MSP documentation platforms like ITGlue or Hudu in existence and Kaseya had yet to ramp up their ungodly sales tactics, it was most often from instinct and best effort.

It stands to reason that there are service providers who have been around since the 90s who have grown with the times yet are still handling things the way they always have because “it always worked before”

Unless regulations are introduced that need to be followed by law, it leads to a hodgepodge of standards and views on how staff are to conduct themselves so that clients have the perception that you are running a professional organization.

Processes And Procedures Lead To Professionalism

I may be a little biased here however this is the first point of call, even if you are a one man operation, act as if, act as if your processes and procedures are supporting 50 staff because if you put in the foundation early so that it can scale effortlessly then it saves a great deal of work down the road.

I attempted several times in the early 2000s to create my own documentation platform using Microsoft CRM out of the action pack. It was clunky and painful to set up but even then I realized the need for my staff to have easy access to client information including passwords. It allowed us to complete jobs faster because we were organized. I cannot tell you how much having a documentation system in place conveys the perception of professionalism to your clients.

If you do nothing else then implement a record keeping system for yours and your clients information. In today’s market, I do not care how small you are, there is no excuse not to be using an off the shelf documentation management platform.

Hudu starts at $33 per month for either self hosted or cloud hosted instances for a single user so even a one man band has no excuse. I may be biased however whenever I meet someone who states something along the lines of “We use sharepoint and OneNote and it is great, no need for special documentation software”

I immediately know that the person does not comprehend what they are talking about. First, are you a cabinet maker or a tool maker? You should not try to be both. Hudu or ITGlue off the shelf are immediately functional where things like Sharepoint or OneNote need to be seriously massaged so that they can be used as a documentation platform for your MSP.

Sure anyone with enough effort can shoehorn a range of products to function as your documentation framework but gee, it really does suck so much time out of your day. Off the shelf right now is the appropriate course of action here.

Homebrew record keeping systems always have glaring deficiencies in them that need to be worked around and are also hideously impractical for this task.

I also realize that I am unlikely to change someone's mind who follows this way of thinking. It is like trying to convince someone who has ridden a horse their entire life to change over to an automobile. No matter how many advantages you rattle off, they will still find a way to convince themselves that a horse is better.

Whichever way you go, having a reliable and standardized platform to store both your clients information as well as your own is an absolute must and the single biggest factor in having your people give the perception of being professional.

Hire People With A Good Outlook

I have learnt this the hard way. When employing technical staff, I would craft in depth and quite complex real world scenarios to find out which applicant had the best possible technical ability.

I invested a lot of time on this part of the hiring process and did not put as much focus on the person's interpersonal skills or the internal qualities they appeared to have.

This bit me quite hard and I am ashamed to say I went through a few staff before learning this lesson and that is it is far better to hire someone who has middle of the road technical skills yet demonstrates a strong aptitude in soft skills like persuasion, self discipline and common sense.

One example I had was a very technically proficient (and expensive) engineer I had hired. While he was great technically, my god he was lazy. Not only that he tended to have an air of contempt for anyone and everyone he interacted with. There was one instance where we needed to replace a battery out of a UPS for a client site of about 15 staff.

I had assumed as a senior well paid and technically proficient engineer, he would have scheduled the battery replacement either before the office opened or after it shut. I was wrong. He drove down to the site at about 2pm and advised everyone they had 5 mins to shut down while he replaced the battery.

It turns out he replaced the battery at 2pm because it was on the way home and the time was perfect for him because it would have been too late in the day to drive back to the office meaning he got off an hour early. I do not know about you but to me that is just outrageous behavior and not something you expect from someone with 6 years experience at that level.

Of course the perception of the client is that we handled things unprofessionally, I was asked why I shut their whole network down in the middle of the day which of course I had no answer for.

That leads me on to the other point, it may well have been my staff members' lack of judgment that caused the issue however the absolute worst possible course of action in this situation is to blame the employee. If you want to project professionalism in your organization then never ever criticize your staff in front of clients no matter what disaster has been caused.

Acknowledge the issue, accept the blame because trying to deflect the blame to one of your staff even if it may have been their fault makes your organization appear unprofessional in the clients eyes and it changes nothing from the clients perspective. They have engaged your business as a whole, the issue they have is with your business not any one individual.

I learnt fast that hiring people for their attitude and outlook was a much better strategy because you cannot change those hardwired attributes while you can easily bring them up to a higher level technically (within reason) Now that is not to say you can hire a babbling fool that thinks RJ-45 is a reference to a fighter jet but it does mean you can allow some wiggle room if you have a great candidate with a good attitude that is a little light in experience or ability.

Couple that with really evaluating new staff in the first couple of months, watch them like a hawk and do not be afraid to hit the kill switch if you can tell they will not be a fit. I have had an instance where I knew the day they started that I would have to let them go and in fact let them go the day they started. I paid particular attention to how they interacted with clients, how they treated their workmates as well as attention to detail.

Another example is someone I hired that ticked all the boxes and was actually perfect in most ways. I could not have known however until one of my other staff pulled me to one side and advised that this new staff member was a one man stink bomb and that several clients had complained about his body odor.

I immediately engaged in a crop dusting maneuver past his desk, did a discrete sniff test and confirmed that it was indeed a serious issue. I pulled him to one side and had a chat about the issue and found out that apparently he was aware of it, he had some type of gland issue and was doing his best but there was nothing else he could do about it.

I had to let him go because it was not fair to the other staff that had to work in a confined space with him and any time Mr Stinky had to attend a client site, the client's perception of our professionalism took a serious hit.

In summary, the people you hire play an equally large role alongside the process and procedure framework in projecting a strong professional image to the outside world.

Empower Your Staff To Make Decisions

Related to the above, I have seen way more often than I should, MSP owners who need to be involved in every single little detail, they do not delegate the responsibility to their staff or if they do they make it clear that if an issue arises, they will be to blame.

I would go so far as to say there is not an insignificant amount of business owners out there that are like this. Having put your processes and systems in place, I strongly advise handing over decision making powers to your subordinate staff without the threat of blame if things go wrong.

The difference between an organization that works this way free of blame to one run by a tyrant is quite significant. The most professional MSPs do not work under the threat of blaming someone if something goes wrong.

Sure if there is a failure at some point it should be investigated so as to learn why the failure occurred and to attempt to avoid it next time but the person responsible should not be punished for an undesirable outcome.

Of course if a struggling staff member continues and repeatedly fails in their tasks then you need to make the decision to relocate them to a job they can complete successfully or they need to be let go. That is completely different to seeking blame for something that went wrong from someone that is otherwise competent and a valued member of the team.

My experience is that work starts to get clogged up when the organization has a culture of blame as everyone is too scared to actually undertake day to day tasks and so this leads to passing jobs on to other staff to minimize their risk and then those staff avoiding undertaking the work for the same reason. It also means you will end up pitting your staff against each other like rabid dogs. Mistrust and low morale will flourish and your MSP will likely suffer for it.

Your clients will also pick up on the high stress levels staff are under and this of course impacts the perceived professionalism your client has for your company.

Discretionary Effort

Discretionary effort is probably the single most valuable behavior a leader can extract from their staff. I do not pretend I ever had the ability to get discretionary effort out of my staff.

It is simply the effort that your staff are willing to put in because they admire you and want to help you succeed. That is my best explanation of it. Think of a person in your past where for whatever reason, you wanted to go the extra mile for them, perhaps an hour early or staying back to do a server upgrade when there was no benefit for you to do so.

It is a pretty rare ability to be able to extract that from others and I am not talking about making people fear the consequences of not saying yes to whatever it is you need someone to do.

This is probably the biggest difference between a manager and a true leader, managers have authority to ask you to do something whereas a good leader makes you want to do the task regardless as to the authority behind the request.

Dress Standard

At the very least for client-facing staff members (including yourself) there should be a dress code that is written in the standard operating procedures that everyone must follow.

Now it does not have to be a suit and tie and I am not going to try and recommend a set type of attire because it varies from location to location. In New York City there may well be a need to wear a suit and tie each day while in Key West, smart casual might be knee length shorts, smart casual top and a Jimmy Buffett hat.

The main thing here is that there is consistency amongst your staff and the standard is never deviated from. This will project a professional look across the board.

Measurements And Analytics

By selecting key indicators to measure in your business, it allows you to continuously work to improve areas that need it. If you do not measure there is no frame of reference and you will never really know which way you are heading.

I have seen companies go crazy here and attempt to monitor and manage every single data point imaginable and it really ends up distracting your focus onto areas that are not important.

By using analytics, it gives you the ability to know if the changes you are making are effective and one thing clients love is continuous improvement, less problems, less time to fix problems. It all adds up to the overarching perception of professionalism with which outsiders see your business.

Of course you must demonstrate to your clients that the reason they are having less issues and the issues are fixed rapidly is because of all the effort invested along with your level of expertise otherwise they are likely to assume they are paying you too much because there are no problems.

Communication

The final piece to the professionalism puzzle is ongoing and consistent communication between staff as well as between your staff and clients. Hopefully you have hired staff that are good communicators and who can work out which client prefers emails only, which ones prefer phone calls and are able to adapt to the various personality styles our clients tend to come in.

Good communication that adapts to the client's preference increases the perception that your organization operates at the highest level of professionalism.

Conclusion

I have listed what I consider the most important factors involved in projecting professionalism across your organization as a managed service provider. There are many smaller topics that also contribute to professionalism but if you can get the above squared away then the bulk of the work is already done.

It is also important to mention that you could be doing all of the above perfectly bar one and it only takes poor performance in one area for your well earned reputation as a professional outfit to come crashing down like a house of cards.

It is vital that all of the above recommendations be continuously worked on and that processes are in place to capture any issues that may occur so that they can be quickly rectified without any long term damage.

We have a number of other IT Service Provider articles listed below that will provide you with more detailed information on a number of related topics:

https://optimizeddocs.com/blogs/consulting/consulting-index-page-01

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Please feel free to explore our other articles and click on any that interest you. If you have any questions or would like to learn more about how we can help you with your documentation