When you’re a small managed service provider (MSP), the owner is the main salesperson, primary technician, head bookkeeper, and office manager. As your company grows, you begin to delegate tasks. Often, the first task to be delegated is bookkeeping because you loathe it. Once you find a bookkeeper to handle your day-to-day accounting tasks, it becomes very tempting to hand it all over.

I regularly speak with managed service providers (MSPs) and one of the biggest challenges I hear them share is selling the concept of managed services to prospects. Many small and medium-sized businesses have yet to move past the concept of break-fix—only paying an IT company to fix things when they break. They don’t fully appreciate the value of the proactive approach that is managed services.

A new year means an opportunity to start fresh. Whether you’re determined to succeed in a new service desk manager job or you’re looking to improve your game in an existing role, it’s always good to get some tips from those who’ve been there and done that. Here are eight tips from experienced service desk managers to help you make the most of your fresh start and flourish at your MSP.

Another year is in the books. In 2018, Auvik published 50 blog posts—each one packed with what we hope is rich content to help you manage networks or build your MSP business efficiently and profitably. Which pieces hit home? These were our top 10 blog posts, as measured by traffic. Thanks for reading!

The sprint to the end of the year can be crazy for MSPs—new maintenance templates have to be made, calendars and expenses need to be updated in the PSA, and everyone has to mentally prepare for the in-laws to visit. Don’t let the Most Hectic Time of the Year affect your bottom line or the health of your team. These nine gadgets will help boost personal productivity, reduce stress, and eliminate distractions so you can help everyone stay focused and productive.

There are serious differences between smaller business and enterprise wireless environments. At the same time, defining “enterprise” can be tricky. For where we’re going in this piece, enterprise equals big as measured by client device counts and diversity, complicated when it comes to security, and critical when it comes to uptime and stability. That gets the conversation started in the right place.

How well does the team within your managed solution provider business communicate? How much would you say the service desk team in your MSP talks to one another? For most MSPs, communication between members of a service desk team relies on the updates that are typed into a ticket, the casual conversations between taking support calls, and perhaps the occasional tap on the shoulder between engineers for specific issues.

When network hardware vendors issue device recalls, field notices, or security alerts, the implication can be massive for MSPs. Take the 2017 clock signal issue, for example. That huge recall of Intel microchips was a large-scale vulnerability for tons of devices—and meant MSPs had to figure out which devices were affected on which client sites.

In part two of our two-part series on MSP hyperspecialization, we share tips and examples of how MSPs can create their own extremely competitive niche. (Read part one on why hyperspecialization is such a high-margin opportunity.) So you get the business benefits of hyperspecializing your MSP to serve a particular business niche, and you understand the five criteria of niche expertise you need to do so. Awesome! You’re ready to jump aboard a high-margin opportunity. But… now what?

Just like the goblins, ghouls, and ghosts that’ll be walking down your street tomorrow night, network management can be scary. If you’re not a network expert (and don’t have one on your payroll), it can be intimidating to make changes to clients’ infrastructure for fear of taking the network down. Small actions can have a big impact.