October 2021

This quarter we’re going to discuss the outcome: Manage the Company.

In Q2 we wrote about “Building a Foundation for Best in Class Services,” and we introduced the 5 Business Outcomes that our clients are looking for:

	1.	Deliver Support Services – Foundation
	2.	Deliver Support Services – Next Level
	3.	Manage the Company
	4.	Lead the Company
	5.	Grow the Company

In Q3 we wrote about “Take Your Support Services to the Next Level.”

As a quick refresher, each of those Outcomes has several Business Challenges and each of those Challenges has a collection of Solutions.

In this illustration, you can see that the Outcome of Manage the Company has several Challenges, and two of them are Conduct Business on a Handshake and Understanding Gross Margin.

Each of those Challenges has many potential Solutions. For the Conduct Business on a Handshake Challenge, there are several Solutions, such as Master Service Agreement, Proposals, Scope of Work and Managed Service Attachments. The Understanding Gross Margin Challenge contains Profit Centers, Benchmarking, as well as CoGS and Expense Alignment.

These are just a small subset of Challenges and Solutions for illustration purposes. Once we have our Support Services in order, it’s time to focus on Manage the Company.

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Onboarding & Offboarding Best Practices Webinar

Just a few weeks ago, IT Glue hosted an excellent discussion around onboarding and offboarding. In addition, our own Rex Frank explained how to identify and beat 10 scalability challenges that can stall your company's growth. Watch the recording and let us know what you think!

Watch the Recording

OUR TOP NEW AND UPDATED CLIENT RESOURCES

The Sea-Level team has been very busy this year, adding new resources and valuable updates to client favorites. Take a few minutes to review the lists below that include direct links to the resources (SLAP login required).

Methods to secure AutoTask PSA and RMM	https://tool.managedservicesplatform.com/#/academy/courses /5124/9ff2eefc-3aad-412a-9374-a21b1f8365d8/13127
Entirely new library on using Co-Managed Support. Guidance on how to set up, flows, etc.	https://tool.managedservicesplatform.com/#/academy/courses/5127
Guide to onboarding service managers	https://tool.managedservicesplatform.com/#/academy/courses /5102/c91a16c3-3222-47b2-ae97-41c6d7de68c0/8768
Intro guide to choosing and utilizing RMM	https://tool.managedservicesplatform.com/#/academy/courses/5089

HERE WE GROW AGAIN

Rob Hird, an executive coach of Sea-Level Operations, joined the company in September of 2021.

Rob started in IT as part of a Y2K project for a local school board, but quickly moved into the fast-paced life of working Bay Street and the Financial District in Toronto, Canada. Moving up the ranks from a help desk technician, team lead, manager, director and finally vice president, Rob has the “been there and done that” experience that many partners appreciate. He started his own MSP in 2015 and, in a short 18 months, was acquired. Rob’s experience in the MSP industry continued as he assisted other partner companies with starting managed services practices and moving away from the traditional break / fix pricing model.

Rob is passionate about getting to know you and your business. He cares about your success, and your happiness is what makes him happy at the end of the day.

Outside of work, Rob enjoys spending time with his wife and their daughter. He is active in the music scene in his town and is an aspiring singer / songwriter. He picked up guitar as a bucket list item on his 40th birthday and hasn’t looked back since.

Keith Marchiano joins Sea-Level with 30 years in leadership, management, sales and executive roles, including 15 years of executive leadership in the managed services industry. He is a family guy, married for 25 years to his wife, Beth. They live in Maryland with their 2 kids, Emma and Josh. Their favorite vacation spot is anywhere near a beach and the ocean. Keith enjoys smoking BBQ and gardening. He is an avid sports fan, his favorite teams being the Baltimore Orioles and the Baltimore Ravens.

Steve St. John, an executive coach of Sea-Level Operations, joined the company in September of 2021.

Steve has been in the IT Industry since 1987, starting in sales for a family-run business in Denver. After managing various divisions within this company, including Administration, Services and Engineering, he left to join EMC as a channel manager for the Rocky Mountain Region. In 2006, Steve joined Lewan Technology in their IT Solutions Division and, by late 2018, he was promoted to president, leading the IT and Print Division. His focus is assisting partners to grow profitably and be successful. Key core values include trust, passion, teamwork and accountability.

A couple of his favorite quotes are “The only thing constant is change” and “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

Steve enjoys spending time with his wife of 33 years and their son and daughter. Exercising and reading a good business book are a couple of his hobbies.

SEA-LEVEL AUSTRALIA APAC UPDATE

James Davis, our managing director, has certainly been busy developing new relationships with other IT communities and vendors in the APAC region. A few insights we would like to pass along are captured below.

Australia and New Zealand have had a tough quarter, seeing most states go into some sort of a lockdown and our travel bubbles being halted. Mentally, many more people are struggling compared to the last widespread lockdowns in 2020. We have been observing a lot of micro disengagement and leaders wanting to shut down. We are seeing more clients dealing with staff leaving them and looking for a change, so we want to see more business leaders focusing on providing initiatives to their employees that will give them purpose and structure, instead of shutting off and going into cruise mode. This is a great article explaining the phenomenon – https://www.gallup.com/workplace/351545/great-resignation-really-great-discontent.aspx.
Some tips from us:
- Ensure you are having 1-on-1 meetings that are helping employees to check in, focusing on the good things they are doing, helping them through performance issues with sympathy, focusing on their development, and giving them something to work towards into the future.
- Don’t pause any initiatives in business improvement – too often we are seeing business momentum get paused and stopped. Owners talk of the uncertainty they are facing, without realizing they are causing far more uncertainty in their business with stopping initiatives that they could realistically continue to achieve.
- Educate your staff on client engagement. Your clients are going through the same things we are. So we need to show leadership and empathy for the situation and ensure that we are engaging in interactions with our clients, not just hiding behind emails to provide client service. Something as simple as taking 5 minutes more to do a job on the phone or virtual call, to engage in more casual talk with the person in an interaction, can make them feel less isolated and develop some closer relationships with end users.
It is important to understand what sort of support there is for small business via the government for wage, skill, project and bill subsidies. Every place is different, and there may be a scheme you are missing out on that you can leverage to improve your business to help your clients and employees through the uncertainty.
- Australia – https://business.gov.au/risk-management/emergency-management/coronavirus-information-and-support-for-business/covid-19-financial-support-for-small-business
- New Zealand – https://covid19.govt.nz/business-and-money/financial-support/financial-support-for-businesses/
Another Quarter of ConnectWise IT Nation Evolve virtual meetings has happened for owners and their sales/service executives. James is fortunate enough to be directly involved as a facilitator, helping develop leaders of today and the future in the peer group format. If you are a +$1M TSP in ANZ, this is a great way to engage with other owners and see the wider industry that allows you to be vulnerable and pick up a lot of knowledge and insight that you wouldn’t normally – https://www.connectwise.com/theitnation/evolve.
This educational webinar series has been going through all the fundamentals of TSP business to help lift the maturity of operations to spark some change and help owners that are stuck. We have been making great strides in an organization that specializes in getting TSPs to interact in their local major city and provide a great many resources through speakers and collateral to help their members. https://www.smbitpro.org/.
We have seen more security threats and massive issues for TSPs this quarter, with the Kaseya incident really highlighting to many how far we are from developing a mature industry when it comes to security in ANZ. With all our experience and interactions with TSPs, we are really seeing a lack of knowledge in how to frame up our risk for ourselves and clients, productize our potential offerings, govern our compliance, understand our employee skill gaps and have the right people focused on implementations. We are doing it in a very ad hoc manner that isn’t getting the results we want, and often many aren’t aware that this is happening. We have developed a security program to guide TSPs through this journey to get the fundamentals right. It puts you into a position of understanding, and establishes the baselines that allow you to grow from there. For anyone interested in understanding more, please feel free to schedule a call to discuss.