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The BrightGauge Blog

Eric Dosal

MSP Key Performance Indicators: Cash Is King

This is the first in a series of blog posts on the topic of the key metrics we used at Compuquip to manage our MSP business. My father used to have a t-shirt that he wore all the time that said ...
This is the first in a series of blog posts on the topic of the key metrics we used at Compuquip to manage our MSP business. My father used to have a t-shirt that he wore all the time that said “Happiness is a Positive Cash Flow” and the key chain that had his office keys said “Cash is King”. So I guess you can say that managing cash has been instilled in me since I was very young. Cash is the lifeblood of any business. If you have no cash, you have no business; simple as that. Cash is an important metric that needs to be monitored regularly. Every day I monitor the cash on hand across all of our accounts across all of the Dosal Capital operating companies. Every morning by 11:00am I get a detailed breakdown of the cash balance in our accounts. I realize not everyone can have someone else run the report, but at a minimum you should be checking it daily to make sure nothing is off. Another safeguard to keep an eye on cash, is signing all the checks yourself. Every single check produced by our companies is signed by me or my brother, regardless of the size. We have some that are less than $10 and others that are over $1,000,000. It’s a great way to keep an eye on the flow of cash out of your business and make sure everything is accurate. I strongly urge every business owner, MSP or not, to keep a close eye on cash because of how vital it is. During times that we thought cash may be a little tight we moved to weekly cash projection reports that our team would prepare. This would factor in what receivables we expect to collect in the next week or two and what checks needed to be cut. This ties in very nicely to our next blog post about Invoice Management, specifically Invoices Over 60 Days Past Due. This blog is part of our Internal Metrics That Matter For MSPs blog series that you can download here: Download White Paper
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Internal Metrics Follow Up

I’ve been humbled with all the feedback on my recent whitepaper “Internal Metrics That Matter for MSPs”. What started out as an idea during a conversation with a my friend Richard Tubb, has really taken on a life of it’s own. After many requests I’ve decided to expand on the themes from the original white paper. But first, a few thoughts on metrics in general. There are so many different metrics to use to manage a business. Actually I think there is too much noise about metrics and it can be overwhelming. Since I speak with most MSPs before they sign up with BrightGauge, I have a good idea on the metric questions people have. The conversation typically goes like this: MSP Prospect: “What metrics do you have out of the box?” Me: “What metrics are important to you, I’m sure we report on it?” MSP Prospect: “I don’t know, what comes as a default?” Many of them are not sure what metrics to be looking at and some are looking to us to tell them. Our reporting platform is completely customizable, so if you wanted to review the most unique and complicated metric, we can probably get to the data and report on it. During my 11 year run as an MSP there were a lot of metrics we used to manage our business. We had 4 monster NOC screen monitors that we posted a bunch of metrics to share with the team. But what’s the value in that? Did anyone really look at it? Was there any action taken? In the future posts I’m going to breakdown into more details the key metrics we used to manage our MSP. We’ll kick things off next week with a metric that is key to every MSP, or any business for that matter, CASH ON HAND!

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Measuring Client Profitability

Do all clients have to be profitable clients? I say yes and no! Let me explain... Of course we’re all in business to turn a profit (unless of course you’re running your MSP as a charity). But profit is just one factor of the right type of client. During my time running our MSP, I came to realize that profit was very important but it wasn’t the only measure to determine the right client. What about referrals? Or brand recognition? Or community impact? But since we know client profit is a critical part of assessing our clients and understanding our business it’s important to measure how each of our clients are performing. One easy way to monitor client profitability is to use the BrightGauge Agreement Profitability Gauge which I have shown below. This gauge was developed based on a manual report we used to run every month to determine the profitability of our customers. Finally we can view the information in more real time and not have to run the report at month end. This is the type of information that can be tremendously valuable to you as an MSP as you make business decisions on which are the right type of clients.

LabTech Software Custom Backup Reporting

One of the most popular requests from our existing LabTech Software customers as well as prospects is our ability to provide reporting on their backups systems. The challenge with this type of reporting is that everyone wants to see the information a little bit differently and there are many different backup systems MSPs are using. Fortunately, Labtech has a very close integration with ShadowProtect Backup Software which many of our customers are using. So we polled these customers and with their help, have created some sweet new gauges to show Backup Success/Failures. In regards to visualization options, some of our customers want to use a table format to give a quick summary and others prefer to provide the report in a bar chart format to show back ups over time. As you can see from the screenshots below, with BrightGauge you can customize exactly how the gauge is viewed for your client’s reports or your own internal report. And there are additional customizations available in the “chart design” on the left side of the image. To learn more please visit web.brightgauge.com/request-a-demo and we can set up a time to connect. LabTech Custom Backup Bar Chart Gauge LabTech Custom Backup Table Gauge

Larry Garcia Joins As Our Business Analytics Specialist

MIAMI, May 13, 2013 – BrightGauge Software, a web-based analytics and reporting platform for Managed Services Providers (MSPs), today named Larry Garcia Business Analytics Specialist. In this position, Garcia will help to develop training programs that educate and instruct BrightGauge customers how to use data gleaned from the software’s robust analytics engine to make critical business decisions. Garcia will lead the introduction of these programs to current customers later this year. ”We are excited to leverage Larry’s experience in education and training to bring a deeper level of services to our customers,” said Eric Dosal, CEO of BrightGauge Software. “His addition to our team comes at the perfect time, as we broaden our global customer base and shift our marketing efforts from need-based software sales to feature-focused product capabilities that improve MSPs’ business operations.” Previously, Garcia was a teacher for Miami Dade Public Schools, where he applied his data analytical skills to develop programs that improved learning for secondary school students across various socio-economic levels. Before this, he was a regional sales representative for Deutsch Asset & Wealth Management. Earlier in his career, Garcia was an investment services advisor with Merrill Lynch Financial Advisory Services. Garcia holds a bachelor’s degree in finance from Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fla.

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Brainstorming What's Ahead For MSPs

A couple of weeks ago Tim Brewer and I were catching up over the phone and decided we were long overdue for a face to face meeting. So this week I flew to Tampa to hang out with my buddy. As most of you know, Tim loves a good party, but he’s also an impressive businessman and after a full day together here are a few of the themes we discussed about what’s coming next and how it will change the MSP industry: Support Today, Architect for Tomorrow – The world we live in today will be drastically different than tomorrow. So how can we make sure we are supporting our customers today but thinking about future and architecting for tomorrow to prep for the next wave of technology? Cloud – The cloud is here to stay. More and more functions, apps, etc are moving to the cloud. The issue about security will eventually be a distant memory just like right now we have no problem with online banking. Our money is in the cloud, soon most things will be also. Data – The rate of data being created is growing exponentially which means eventually it will become a problem and people will need help to manage that data. The value of a corporation is in their data and their ability to compile it, analyze it, summarize it, and then act on it. Software – Software is going to be a major force in the MSP space going forward and we all need to adapt to it. As Marc Andreessen said, “software is eating the world”. I think he’s right. So how can we leverage software to make our businesses more efficient and how can we help our customers leverage software to be more efficient. Frictionless Sales – We need to lower the friction in the sales process so that we can make it easier to find our potential customers, easier to qualify them, easier to provide them the info they need to evaluate the offering, get them to sign up. Then we need to get them on board showing immediate value to them and their end users. There is so much friction in a typical sales process, but imagine if we could reduce it. Tim and I spent the entire day together which included a brainstorming session in the morning, idea swapping over lunch and wrapped up with a planning session for him and his family’s trip to Miami later this year. A big thanks to Captain Tim (as you can see from the picture below) for hosting me in Tampa and look forward to connecting again in Miami!

Where's Eduardo?

Have you seen The Social Network? Check it out if you haven’t! but keep reading… My brother has always been the one with the great and crazy ideas. As a matter of fact, he was the one with the idea to start a software company that focused on eliminating the confusion in IT, aka BrightGauge! Now we are 5 weeks away from our official launch date and Brian came up with another idea, to head out to San Francisco to “see where the action is”. For the past 6 weeks, Brian has been solely dedicated to BrightGauge and so when he came up with this trip I thought he might be a little crazy (again). But as we did some research and were introduced to a few impressive contacts in a short period of time, we realized it was great part of the country to meet strong people in this business. We still have a lot to learn and the experts in this field are mostly out in Northern California. So why not head out there was his thinking. Fortunately we do have some great meetings scheduled and it should be a very good time. So when Brian asked me again if I wanted to go along I said “ABSOLUTELY”. I don’t want to miss out on any of the action in California, like Eduardo did. We’ll be in downtown San Fran and Palo Alto so check us out on Twitter to keep up with our travels!

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