4 Unexpected Reasons MSP Owners Love IT Glue
BY IT GLUE | January 15, 2018
Last week, we discussed the unique value that IT Glue brings to distributed teams. SaaS tools can be quite powerful for distributed teams, and the collaborative, transparent nature of IT Glue makes it a perfect complement to the workflow of any distributed team. The owner of an MSP has unique concerns, going beyond the managerial, transparency aspects. Let’s talk about some of them.
Remote Work
One MSP we talked to recently reported that he was running his business from another country – he decided to move and because of his team was leveraging SaaS tools like IT Glue, he was able to continue running his business, but from a location of his choosing. If running your business from Bora Bora is for some reason not your speed, consider that “remote work” in this context could just as easily mean longer vacations, or transitioning to your retirement destination of choice gradually, while simultaneously building the value of your business in preparation for your exit strategy.
Automate Everything
A critical element of running a lean, efficient MSP is to automate as much work as possible. DevOps is big for MSPs in 2018. It’s actually quite simple – the more work you automate, the less work you have to do manually. The less you’re doing manually, the more time you have for other things. We talk about how IT Glue can reduce time waste by 50% or more, but if you start building your own means of automating documentation, that number can be much higher. At that point, as the owner, what you want to do with that free time is up to you – but if spending more time away from the office is part of your vision, IT Glue can help get you there.
M&A
There are two paths to growth – organic and M&A. You can grow organically by plowing back your newfound free time into your business. But IT Glue also makes merger and acquisition transitions easier. You can onboard all those new clients you just acquired quickly, and the more automated your documentation processes are the faster the onboarding will go. You can get a new team of techs working on any client right away. So many of the little practical things that can mess up a post M&A integration – knowledge transfer, migrating customers to different systems – can be made easier with IT Glue.
The other thing is that most mergers and acquisitions result in a company with multiple offices. This is where being able to work from anywhere, and have full transparency, comes into play. If the acquired company needs your direct and personal attention, you’re still able to do everything from that office just as if you were at your home office.
Value-Added M&A
How much was IT Glue worth to your business? What was the ROE increase from those productivity gains? Any acquisition you’re looking into should have some value to you – it needs to make more money with you running it than it did under the old team. Knowing that you can save money just by setting up IT Glue in your new acquisition helps you get a better handle on the potential value of that acquisition.
Think about it like this. If you’re looking to buy an MSP and you estimate that just adding IT Glue to their stack alone is worth $100,000/year, and that you might add another $200,000 in value from other aspects of your management, that $300,000 per year is a good starting framework for understanding how much you should pay to make the acquisition. Forget banking on unspecified “synergies” that may or may not arise – negotiate knowing exactly how you’ll get value out of the deal.
Net result – growth is easier.
IT Glue is an information management platform that allows for efficient storage and retrieval of all the documentation you need to help your MSP run better. By integrating PSA and RMM data, we can help increase your efficiency, and reduce onboarding times by even more. By eliminating wasted time from your business, IT Glue gives you more time to focus on what matters – growing your business.
