Making a transition from being “the IT guy” to being a full-fledged MSP provider can be a difficult choice.

I’m going to discuss why one might want to consider the transition, the value it adds (and removes!), and how it changes the game you play as an IT provider.  I’ll also take into stark consideration how this all looks to the customer.

This is part one.  I expect this to be comprised of at least a few posts, it may well break out into as many as 6 posts.

Let me start out by giving the article a bit of context.  As a tech, I’ve seen my fair share of different industries.  One common theme I see particularly among SMB’s, is that most of them don’t understand IT.

The SMB is a funny market.  They often are cheap.  But they tend to suffer very heavily when things break.  Cheap things tend to break more often.  Large enterprises might lose more money per hour of downtime, but they have tons of cash stocked away for improving the equipment and services to ensure minimal downtime.

Let’s face it – no strategy is perfect, and at the end of the day the only thing you can do with cash is trade it for other things.  So would you rather be an SMB with little cash-on-hand and a bullet proof system that will (theoretically) ensure less than 1 hour of downtime per year, OR, a large enterprise with millions of dollars sitting in a bank vault but a flaky, hacked together infrastructure that leaves employees frustratedly twiddling their thumbs all day?

Yes yes, I know, it never works this way around, but the situation is hypothetical and serves to prove a point.  Value comes before cash.  The value of the IT guy can be huge.  But – he only gets paid when things break.

I will end the first article by saying this – if the only time the IT guy gets paid is when things break, where is the incentive for him to make sure that things don’t break?

Comments are appreciated.  This series is going to focus on bringing value to the table by providing incentive and flipping the priorities around.

IT Guy to MSP: Why? Part 2

Originally posted 2009-12-30 23:33:32.