Famed Irish writer George Bernard Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
He was talking about risk, innovation and differentiation. When you adapt to the world around you, you essentially become a part of the landscape. When you adapt the world to yourself – and mold the world to your liking – you become exceptional.
The next generation of solution providers and MSPs won’t become part of the landscape. We believe they will change the world around them through vision, innovation and fortitude.
With that said, part of the problem we’re combating in managed services today is that too many providers are willing to be a part of the landscape. We, as an industry, have done a masterful job boiling managed services down to kits that practically anyone can open up and start selling, or technology tools that seem “automatic” and easy to take on complex IT operational tasks . At this pace, managed services will be no better than Amway or Avon. Surprisingly, no one has tried pulling a Mary Kay marketing scheme to give every MSP a pink Cadillac hybrid.
Thinking Bigger
What does it mean to be successful by changing the landscape to your world vision? Look no further than the icons of the industry. Larry Ellison. Steve Jobs. Bill Gates. Thomas Watson. Mark Zuckerberg. What these people did was not play by the rules created by the rest of the industry, but rather rewrite their own rules according to a vision they had to do something differently. And here’s the thing about them: Each was considered unreasonable when they started out.
We can talk about technology and business models and marketing schemes and vendor alliances built on APIs and channel programs, and it’s all meaningless when managed services – as a market segment – is built on industry scale and not individual scale.
What’s the difference?
- Individual scale is when a business is built to grow by expanding resources to meet customer needs and market demands.
- Industry scale is when the industry creates legions of providers for the purpose of pushing more of their product and not necessarily the sales and profitability of the individual provider.
We need more unreasonable people in managed services. We need mavericks who aren’t willing to accept the latest 5-step guide to becoming a MSP, or sell the same set of services as the other 5,000 guys in the room at some conference in Las Vegas, Chicago or Orlando. We need people who will look at the current technologies and imagine new services, applications and total solutions that create value. And, we need providers who are willing to take a serious look at their own IT operations. Ones who do the math and understand their delivery costs, as well as the value proposition they’re able to offer because they can manage virtualized data centers, unified communications, even clouds.
The managed services market needs to heed Shaw’s advice. The value to change the world around you means you won’t eventually become just another tree in the forest.
P.S. You want more change in your business? Get a head start on it now, click here for a special offere.
Justin Crotty is senior VP and GM of NetEnrich, which provides closet to cloud services for MSPs. Monthly guest blogs such as this one are Talkin’ Cloud’s annual platinum sponsorship.
The 
Great article, couldn’t agree more. I think one thing fueling the seeming “commoditization of MSPs” are the number of services providers out there telling companies how easy it is to get into the space, just look at this slick “MSP in a box program you can use to overcome what barrier used to be there.” It’s fueling a lot of new MSPs coming from different arenas that often underestimate the rigors and complexities of operating and growing a successful MSP, let alone having the ability/capacity to really be innovative/creative and get outside the lines of the program they’re being given to sell.
Jim,
Crotty is a pretty sharp guy. Frankly, I think most folks no longer talk about how “easy” it is to become an MSP. After all: If you a VAR that never successfully sold services, what makes you think you can sell managed services? Challenging stuff. But the best MSPs continue to accelerate their businesses…
-jp