MSP Answers

Buy a New Car I wrote last week that I don’t believe in New Year’s Resolutions and I haven’t changed my mind in a week. If you do want an objective for the beginning of this year, then resolve to buy a new car. It might seem a littl…

New Year’s Resolutions I have a terrible confession to make. I really don’t want too many people knowing this terrible and dark secret so I am entrusting the integrity of the readers of MSPAnswers to keep my secret safe. If word gets out,…

Vision across the organisation I am sure you well remember the day. On 25 May 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced to a joint session of Congress that an American would land safely on the moon before the end of the decade. Ambitious and visionar…

Lead Article (Self-help topic – ARE COUPONS GOOD FOR BUSINESS) Way back in 1887, Coca-Cola was the first company to use the concept of coupons. Coupons were actually physical items back then – nothing like the electronic versions of today…

Tips for completing award submissions In a curious statistic that probably soaked up significant funds from a government department in a research grant, it was recently revealed that 100 per cent of people who had never bought a ticket in a lottery h…

Awards season As you approach the holiday season, it is a great time to reflect on your business and analyse what you are doing and work out ways to do it better. Although Christmas time is not usually the season for business awards, it is a good tim…

Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Managed Services Several years ago, I would ask my clients what their set response was in relation to their IT if they had a disaster. It was amazing how many responded in a similar fashion. “I would thro…

Lead Article (Self-help topic – FINANCE AS A SALES TOOL) Many businesses work on attracting new clients and selling more equipment. There is logic in that process. Some of the statistics from a recent survey though may scare a few people. The s…

ROI calculations In justifying the cost of an SLA or major capital expenditure, many managers live and die by cold, hard ROI calculations. It is part of the modern trend of ensuring that no individual can be blamed when something goes wrong – o…

Bring your own hardware I was at a recent meeting with a high-ranking Microsoft employee. This particular employee had the obligatory smartphone on the desk and, no surprises here; it was running Windows Phone 7 as the OS. While this didn’t see…

Thought Leadership on Internet filtering Donald Rumsfeld (former US Secretary of Defense) was roundly criticised for an abuse of the English language for his press briefing statement in 2002: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we…

How many mistakes can you make? Everyone has a friend that tells them stories about their dreams. Incredible stories. Stories where the dreams match a later event with almost unbelievable accuracy. I have a friend who is convinced that he has some fo…

How do people like to pay for professional services? Anecdotal evidence is fine to allow you to form a hypothesis but if you want to make firm decisions in relation to your business, it is better to do it with cold hard statistics. I have long been a…

Can a chipset help your Managed Services solution? Several years ago, I participated in a combined case study with Intel and an automation tool to gauge the impact of using an advanced remote chipset such as that provided by Intel vProTM technology. …

Will a PSA actually make you more money? If you feel a few too many pounds around your girth when you buckle your belt, you might consider seeing a fitness instructor and asking for some advice. Many people are interested to find out which is the bes…

Work smarter or harder There are some business models that rely solely upon increasing your workforce and making a margin on what you pay each employee. For example, your cost for each employee (including all on-costs) might total $55 per hour. Your …

Lead Article (Self-help topic – VISION) Is Apple going to survive without Steve Jobs? Why are people even asking this question? There are 49,399 other employees at Apple who can surely continue on the same as they did the day before Steve annou…

Lead Article (Self-help topic – CHANGE) When an IT business decides to make that daunting leap from break/fix to MSP, it involves that scariest of words. Change. Humans are really basic animals. We only need four things to survive – oxyge…

Lead Article (Self-help topic – STAFF) Every business that I speak with tells me how hard it is to attract and retain great staff. Even terrible staff are incredibly hard to attract and retain in the current employment environment. There are a …