Managing Technicians In An MSP Business For Profitability - Part 2

When running a managed service provider (MSP) business, the single largest part of the overall costs of doing business is the technicians that support your end customer – from straight salary and benefits, to training, transportation and managing the collection of their time, through to billing the customer. In this series of whitepapers, Karl Palachuk goes through the elements that you need to take into account to best manage your technicians’ time. This includes everything from how to structure their day and their priorities, to tracking their efforts to ensure that your business is being run in the most productive manner – ultimately driving the most profitability.

Should You Do Billable Work First?

This section is not a “policy” as such, but a discussion of a proposed policy.

Every managed service provider (MSP) has three big categories of work that need to be performed: billable work, work covered by managed service agreement (MSA) and internal work.

So the question is: In what order should you do this work? And, more specifically, should you schedule truly billable work first?

Let’s assume for now that you will make internal work a low priority unless there’s an important task or project that just needs to get done.