The BrightGauge Blog

Internal Metrics Follow Up

Written by Eric Dosal | July 3, 2013

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!