Boosting Cashflow WITHOUT Selling More IT Services

Have you ever wondered how to increase cash flow without actually having to go out and get new clients? The majority of the cash flow you have at your disposal is available in your existing clients. Most MSPs have so much available cash flow that they are leaving on the table. For most of your existing clients, that’s where you should start – go back to your existing client base, start with them, do cyber security risk assessments, go through the whole process we call “running the play”.

#RunThePlay

Run the play, and you will see the majority of the opportunity. I’ll give you an example. One of our clients, Brett Galant from northern Canada, went back to his base. He had around 600 endpoints when he started with us, and roughly $30,000 of monthly recurring revenue. In a year and a half, he went back and increased his MRR fivefold with fewer endpoints.

There is so much money available in your existing client base, and it is much easier because they already know you, like you, and trust you. It is much easier to go back and get a meeting with them. You just have to be confident enough in your sales process and everything you do to say, “Look, we have to change things. Things have changed, we have to do things differently.”

Absolutely, there is money left on the table. Absolutely, there are tons of available capital; you just have to be confident, you have to have a process, and you have to have a “why” to go back and talk to them.

Pivoting From Break-Fix to Managed Cybersecurity

If you are more on the break-fix side of things, how do you do that? Is it just increasing the price, or what is the process to make that increase?

First, your mindset as an MSP should be “we can get leads from break-fix”, and break-fix is a great paid lead opportunity.

If your entire client base is all break-fix, you need to run the play on that entire client base. Here is the process:

Go back and make a list of all your clients. Sort it by order of importance, which is usually how big they are or how much money they pay you. Sit down and educate them about cyber security – why they need to focus on cyber, not just “managed services” like “managed services” which is now a buzzword. Never actually use that term with a client.

Explain why they need to focus on cyber security, that they are going to get hacked, and why they need to put these things in place. Namely, give them the “why” – they need to establish a pattern that they cared, you were not negligent, you tried, you know you were potentially going to get hacked but you did all the right things so then somebody can sue, and basically, somebody else can pay the bill, an insurance company, that is the goal.

Educate them, and then your goal coming out of that sit-down meeting is to get them to agree to a cyber security risk assessment. On break-fix, depending on the relationship with the client, this is an in-betweener, you would probably charge them for it, but maybe not always.

“Educate them, and then your goal coming out of that sit-down meeting is to get them to agree to a cyber security risk assessment”

Don’t Be a Commodity

The key is to not make the product or service all about price because even with the CSRA, the cyber security risk assessment, or the actual managed security product, whatever you are selling cannot be commoditized. It cannot be about the product; it cannot be the price point making the decision. It is that they have to put these things in place, and this is now a necessity, not just something that would be cool to have to maybe make the business more efficient, which is the old way we all used to do it.