In 2016, our MSP’s growth journey was making local headlines.It seems like a lifetime ago when we opened our doors as an MSP in May of 2002. We grew consistently over the next 15 years.
By the time we sold the business in 2018, we had two offices and 26 staff. We were doing our best work. Our clients were happier than ever. And we had won a stack of awards for business excellence.
Growing a service business is tough. It’s a constant balancing act between getting clients and finding the right staff to service them, while maintaining margins and profits.
When the company grows quickly (which seems like a good thing), it’s hard not to let service levels slip. This can spark client attrition, which risks your reputation and the entire business’s future. But staffing up too early (or spending too much on individual staff members), can kill your margins, your profits, and your business.
The challenge is getting the balance right.
Overworked Staff
Declining Service
Lost Clients
Bad Reputation
Happy Clients
Balanced Team
Generous Margins
Bright Future
No Clients
No Staff
No Business
Excess Capacity
Few Clients
Thin Margins
Going Broke
As we began to grow, we focussed on running an efficient team. Margins increased beyond the 8% industry standard, but we were soon dropping the ball with client service.
We always managed to handle the urgent things like issues that occurred overnight and tickets that were raised during the day. But monitoring and maintenance were slipping.
Clients didn’t really notice. But when we discovered monitoring had not been done for a month, and 3 backups had failed, we knew we had failed too, leaving our clients vulnerable.
We slowed growth to stabilise the business. And even considered compromising our goals and settling for a small company. We knew that wasn’t the answer. But as soon as we took on more clients, we had to find more staff. Hiring locally was expensive and we struck the same balance issues between service and profits.
We’d heard mixed results about offshoring in the Philippines and decided to check it out for ourselves. To be honest, we couldn’t even point to the Philippines on a map. So, we decided to go there to see things firsthand. We learned a lot from our 3-6 monthly research trips.
FreelancingFirst, we naively tried hiring freelancers. Let’s just say that was the first of many unfortunate surprises. We decided to pull the pin on this when we were having a meeting with one of our contractors and heard a lot of background noise.
When we asked her about this, she simply said she was working from a café. When we asked why, she said it was because her roof was leaking at home. It turned out that water was leaking through her roof and onto her electricity box causing the power to surge, which fried her laptop.
So, here she was, working on a borrowed laptop, in a busy café, with insecure internet, and people looking over her shoulder at clients’ private details. On top of this, she was working for other MSPs at the same time to earn more money.
Network Operations Centres (NOC) We tried outsourcing certain services to a Network Operations Centre (NOC). After investing 9 months training two people (for redundancy) we thought we had finally found the answer. Suddenly, both team members left the NOC, leaving us scrambling to service clients.
We later discovered that one staff member had left because he was offered 20% more money by another NOC. As soon as he started at the new NOC, he contacted his friend and invited him to jump ship too. If they, or our NOC, had only talked with us, we would have happily paid 20% more. We would have paid 30% or even 40% more, because we had invested so much in training.
But nobody said a word and we were (once again) painfully out of balance.
Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) Then we tried various BPOs. But we had almost no control over the people or processes. Our BPOs hired the wrong staff for the wrong positions. We didn’t understand the culture – especially the way Filipinos think about authority and communicate with foreign managers.
As a result, staff churn was crippling. We had 10 people coming and going constantly and couldn’t keep up with the onboarding and training let alone get any meaningful value from our team. And because the BPOs were generalists who didn’t really understand tech services, they kept making the same hiring mistakes again and again.
We located our offices in Clark in order to provide staff with the least stressful and most productive working environment available in the Philippines. We took all the painful lessons we had learned and started from scratch building our own offshore team. Rather than follow other BPOs into the ‘wilds’ of Manila, we chose a more suburban area in Clark.
Rather than trust resumes and references, we created skill tests and got to know candidates over informal conversations. And rather than merely replicated our onshore roles, we created niche roles for our offshore team so they could grow in skills and confidence.
We invested heavily in onboarding to make new team members feel valued and secure in their jobs (a huge thing for Filipinos). We gave them regular feedback and encouragement. And rewarded them with extras like free lunch and events.
From humble origins servicing our own MSP’s needs, the Technology Elite team has grown to more than 410 members.
Word quickly got around and other MSPs started asking us for advice to help them establish an offshore team. Demand grew so much that we started a consulting company. We eventually realised that other MSPs simply wanted us to do it for them. That’s when we sold our MSP and started Technology Elite. Twelve years on, our team has expanded to 410 members and we have helped more than 160 companies to thrive through offshoring.
Will you continue struggling to balance service and profits (like we did). Or will you investigate the opportunity to boost your service standards, margins, and profits with a Technology Elite offshore team?
Take the next no-risk, no-obligation step now and schedule a Free Offshoring Opportunity Assessment with an experienced Offshoring Expert.
Schedule a Free Offshoring Opportunity Assessment
