Ok, so you’ve had some time to think over step one..now on to some more practical steps that you need to take:
Gather your data
Step 1
You need YOUR numbers to have the best results when you price your managed services offerings! Below are the numbers you need
1. How much did my top 20 clients by revenue spend with me last year on services?
2. What is that total dollar amount?
3. How smoothly was the money spent; break it down by month.
4. How many total employees did that support?
5. How many workstations did that support?
6. How many services did that support?
7. What was my gross profit on those top 20 clients?
8. How many hours did I spend on those top 20 clients?
9. What was my effective hourly rate?
10. How many tickets did these top 20 clients generate?
You can gather this information from your PSA application and your accounting package in pretty short order.
Step 2
Start making a spread sheet. Make columns for items above. Play with the numbers a little bit. Become very familiar with patterns. When you see spikes in the data, figure out why and research the anomalies.
Step 3
Learn your top 20 client’s top line revenue. This is the hard step but one of the most important. Since they are your top 20 clients we can safely deduce that they are your target client. Therefore you want more like them. Once you learn their revenue you can apply a rule of thumb that most firms will spend 4.5% of their revenue on IT. Put that information into your spreadsheet as well and see how their spending with you compares. Do additional research using resources like Gartner Group, CIO Magazine, and specific industry publications to get actual data on what they spend. 4.5% is a rule of thumb and we all know what rules of thumb are best for…measuring thumbs!
Time to make some choices with what model you will use!
Tags: managed services
