The BrightGauge Blog

Finding and retaining the best candidates is a common challenge for any business, and it also happens to be the topic that our customers bring up most often in their conversations with us. There are a ton of resources available on general best practices for hiring and keeping a team engaged, but we wanted to take a closer look at the specifics of the MSP industry. Our conversation with John Davenjay, CEO of the IT Services staffing firm Bowman Williams, highlighted the industry’s current trends and insights as seen from both an employer’s and employee’s perspective. Finding and Keeping the Right Employees in an MSP: Episode Highlights An introduction to John and Bowman Williams (0:50) A closer look at how John helps MSPs plan their hiring pipeline and scale their business (2:49) Hiring trends in the IT Services market: salaries, skillsets, tenure, and more (3:44) The main reason why candidates look to leave an MSP (8:17) How MSPs can help retain their talent: details on culture and avoiding flight risks (11:22) How business owners can start building career tracks to help retain talent (16:04) The need to be nimble in small companies with limited advancement opportunity (18:02) Combating the fear of recruiter cost vs. companies who spend tons of time searching for a candidate alone (19:30) The ideal customer for Bowman Williams in the MSP recruiting space (22:47) Q&A: Favorite business book, best personal improvement resource, parting advice about recruiting, how to reach John (25:29) Book mentioned in the episode: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t, by Jim Collins Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.

For the past 7-10 years we’ve been hearing that the MSP industry is going to be disrupted by Google and Microsoft cloud services. In fact, even a current customer came to our office the other day saying he is worried about the future of the industry yet he’s grown 25% YoY for the past 5 years (>$2MM revenue to start). At this point I think it’s fair to say that the industry is healthy, growing, but also as a whole has a terrible paranoia about the future. Anecdotally we hear this constantly even as we meet hundreds of new MSPs entering the market each year who are looking to us for a data platform, or we meet the smartest MSPs who are dropping over 20% in EBITDA constantly every year with $5MM + in revenue. Another way to look at it is how much M&A money is flowing into software vendors such as Autotask, N-Able, LogicNow, Kaseya, etc. Private Equity and acquisitions with great multiples means smart people are betting on MSPs growing and seemingly their bets have paid off as more investments keep on pouring in. This is a very encouraging sign on top of our anecdotal evidence with our personal experience. All in all I think it goes back to technology support (in whatever form) for small business will always be needed as technology is ever changing. The only constant of technology is change. And as long as there are small to medium sized businesses then there will be need for MSPs. We may not be featured in TechCrunch but I believe many of us will take cash flow over hype any day of the week! If you want to learn about how our customers are growing, request a demo with BrightGauge today. We help IT Services companies (MSPs) become more data driven with our powerful data platform. You’ll learn how we feel the right Dashboards, Custom Reporting, and Scorecards in one easy to use platform will help any company grow!

Did you know that employees believe 30-50% of their peers lack accountability, according to a study from the American Management Association? Of course, accountability can refer to a number of different traits. Are they socially accountable, and willing to admit a social faux pas? Are they accountable in their performance and effectiveness? Are they accountable to their team and collaborators? Do they appropriately prioritize their tasks and inform stakeholders of changes? In truth, accountability is all of the above and more. To inject accountability into a team that is lacking it requires a concerted effort from the top of an organization. To encourage accountability, employees must have a clear definition of the standard that they are being held to. Defining clear and realistic goals is crucial. Accountability is driven by company culture and that culture comes from the top down. Goal-setting is the most critical component for fostering an environment that encourages accountability. Learn the right way to set and track goals, establish a cadence, and drive your organization forward using accountability. Setting Goal Scope and Creating Shared Purpose Accountability is driven and facilitated by the culture within an organization. The policies that shape that culture must be expected of all employees, from the owner down to new hires that are just learning the ropes. Successful teams must embrace accountability as individuals and groups, but organizations must also be accountable as a whole. Accountability works its way into company culture when teams are willing to take ownership of their objectives, not because they have to, but because they want to. When they are unsuccessful, those same individuals should be willing to take ownership of their failures. Passing the buck and making excuses leads to resentment and ultimately works against an accountable workplace. Accountability doesn’t come from strict rules and discipline. It comes from an open environment where stakeholders aren’t afraid to contribute. The goals that you set within your company should encompass all levels of work and collaboration: Organizational goals. Goals that encompass the company or organization as a whole. Organizational goals are the driving force behind shaping all other goals. Team goals. Goals for departments, teams, and collaborations. These goals should help dictate the individual goals employees set for themselves. Individual Goals. Individual goals help advance careers while progressing toward a company's larger objectives. These goals should build toward both team and organization goals. Creating a shared purpose for teams ensures that no large goals fall squarely on the shoulders of one person. Instead, those successes and failures fall on the company as a whole. According to Partners in Leadership’s Workplace Accountability Study, 85% of those surveyed were not sure what their organization was trying to achieve. This kind of disconnect actively works against accountability in the workplace. Clearly defining the organization’s goals and connecting them to smaller team goals provides clear insight into company direction and motives. Every employee should have clarity on the importance of specific goals to see the bigger picture. Setting Effective Long and Short-Term Goals When setting goals, each type should include both short-term and long-term goals. Long-term goals are completed after successfully completing a series of short-term goals. One goal should build to the next, one step at a time toward a larger company vision. Although long-term goals mark the finish line, short-term goals play the largest role in daily accountability. Fast, sustained completion of goals provides consistent rewards. To set realistic goals, those goals should be tied to specific business metrics that set a clear line for success. These metrics, known as key performance indicators (KPIs) may include metrics like revenue, sales figures, or job-specific metrics such as first call resolution rate and cost per incident. Accountability is a Two-Way Street According to the Workplace Accountability Study by Partners in Leadership, 80% of respondents surveyed said that feedback was only provided when something went wrong with a project. This sends the wrong signal to employees, who begin to see feedback as a negative development. A step where feedback is given should be a part of any project, regardless of the outcome. That feedback shouldn’t just focus on negatives, but highlight the positives as well. This promotes a culture of accountability for both the good and bad and lets employees know they are appreciated. Next Steps for Improving Accountability Accountability matters, but is not easy to achieve in large companies. It starts from the top down, from organizational goals through helping employees define their own. Performance accountability is achievable when employees have clear initiatives, but too often organizational accountability is misunderstood and confused with discipline. This does more harm than good. As you make changes to facilitate more accountability within your company, remember to take things one step at a time. You can’t make an unaccountable workforce change their stripes overnight, but you can make progress overtime with a game plan and consistency. Are you ready to take the next step in setting up a culture of accountability in your company? Learn more about the right way to set and track goals, establish a cadence, and drive your organization forward using accountability.

IT Security in today’s world is no longer a basic blocking and tackling approach mixed in with a bit of antivirus protection. And as the state of security continues to evolve rapidly, it’s hard to keep up with all of the threats that businesses face. We recently sat down with Javier Sola, Cyber Security Director at Compuquip, and asked him to share some insights on how you should be thinking about security, how to educate your customers on security, and updates on some of the recent topics associated with security threats. The State of Today's IT Security: Episode Highlights Javier’s intro and background (0:49) How to approach helping a new customer with their network (4:20) How should SMBs be looking at their security? (6:43) Where to start with security for companies with a limited budget (8:58) Hot topics right now in security: next generation firewalls, zero day threats, sandboxing, network access control and data loss prevention (10:11) How would you start to educate a new customer on IT security if they’ve never thought about this topic before? (15:58) Why you should have an expert partner to rely on for different security domains (19:15) Advice to engineers on assessing perimeter database applications (20:54) Is it more or less difficult to secure cloud applications as compared to an on-premise infrastructure? (23:23) Resources for learning more about security (24:57) Parting advice for companies getting started with security, and how to reach Javier (28:56) Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.

The beginning of the year is a very anxious time of year at BrightGauge. For us, Q4 is our biggest quarter of the year and the Sales team hustles until the end of the year leaving no stone unturned. So when the calendar changes, we are still coming off the “high” of Q4 and the year end rush. But now the page has turned on the prior year, the high fives have been doled out and the champagne has been poured... it’s time to focus on this year. The entire sales team gets very anxious when we start planning the new year wondering “how’s my compensation changing” or “what’s my new quota going to be”. By the second week of January I sit with the Sales Team and we lay out the quota for the year. Like clockwork I can see them in their heads calculating all the work they have to do for the year which seems like a daunting task. But like I tell our Sales Team: “Don’t sweat the annual goal, focus on the daily & weekly hustle” At the end of the day, Sales is a numbers game. Although the percentages may be different based on how good you are, it's still a game of getting as many non-customers as possible into your funnel and then working them through the funnel to customer status. When we told Stephen his quota had almost doubled to $80,000 after last year doing $45,000 he had a minor panic attack. But then we took the annual goal and broke it down into daily & weekly goals. Here’s how our annual Sales formula works: $80,000 - total new business Stephen needs to book in 2017 $64,000 - total revenue from new customers (80%) $16,000 - total revenue from upgrades of existing customers (20%) $250 - Average Sales Price $75 - Average Upgrade Amount 256 - Number of Signups Required ($64,000 / $250) 213 - Number of Upgrades Required ($16,000 / $75) 512 - Number of Opportunities Required (256 deals @ 50% closure rate) At the end of the calculations, we translate that $80,000 quota into the following: 10 Opportunities Opened Per Week 7 Demos Completed Per Week 40 Conversations Per Week And instead of worrying about the $80,000 all Stephen has to do is worry about what he needs to get done today and this week. And to always remember: “Don’t sweat the annual goal, focus on the daily & weekly hustle” Now that we have his targets for each week, we use our BrightGauge Scorecards to monitor his progress each week. This allows him and the entire team to see if he’s on track or off track for a given week and course correct as necessary. The more green the better! And this also has the added psychological benefit of taking a monster quota goal and breaking it down into bite size chunks that are easier for Stephen to focus on. To learn more about scorecards and how to help your team monitor weekly progress towards their KPIs, please visit our BrightGauge Scorecards Overview.

Our development team had an unusually busy end of February. We hosted our first-ever Builders’ Meeting, welcoming other engineering teams in the Miami area, and that following weekend members of our team namely, myself and Francisco, headed to San Francisco for nerd time at ForwardJS, a JavaScript-focused conference Downtown. The Sights With tutorial days mixed in and a single, all-day conference on the schedule for the week, Sunday was spent exploring and getting settled as first-time SF visitors. If you’ve never been, take it from us that SF is a city with beautiful architecture and landscape. For one, they have hills with steep inclines which is cool to see coming from incredibly-flat Miami. I made a couple touristy stops before the day was through, visiting The Palace of Fine Arts, getting a glimpse of the Golden Gate Bridge from Chrissy Field and then taking in the fantastic sight that is Twin Peaks before getting dinner with Francisco in the Embarcadero Waterfront area and calling it a night ahead of tutorial day number one. View of The Golden Gate Bridge from Chrissy Field One thing to know about San Francisco is that its food game is generally on point as day one’s breakfast highlighted: fantastic salmon scrambled eggs and eggs Benedict. Another thing to know is that there are apparently consumer incentives for low-emission vehicles as most of the cars we traveled in were hybrids which stood out to us. The Tutorials ForwardJS tutorials are all day (9:30am - 4:30pm) affairs and absolutely worth the time spent. They're on the smaller side in terms of class sizes and give you the chance for a deeper understanding of specific topics. Of the plethora of tutorial options available during the week, Francisco and I picked subjects on: ReactJS core principles Web Performance Features new in ES6 (ES2015) Asynchronous JavaScript Patterns in general and with ReactJS Francisco’s Asynchronous JavaScript Pattern Tutorial with Kyle Simpson In addition to being exposed to great content on JavaScript, web development and getting to explore San Francisco, one of the other major highlights of attending tech conferences of this nature is being able to meet others in the industry and learn about the contexts in which they work. Lunch tutorial breaks were ripe for this occasion, especially since we conveniently ate in the hotel restaurant where the conference was hosted. Besides lunch, the conference organizers hosted a few happy hour events to facilitate more socializing which was also fun. We partook in some street sushi and hard cider and loved it. Conference Day Conference day came and went with a few tutorial-appropriate subjects but of course in bite-sized talks. We attended sessions that highlighted the importance of designing applications smartly to reduce user cognitive load in making decisions, introduced the concept of service workers (very cool stuff), explored ReactJS virtualization (windowing) and a few other talks touching on React basics and best practices. All-in-all, it was quite an organized and adequately paced conference day with awesome presenters. Before I forget, thanks to our group lunches (and street sushi) we also managed to make some conference friends! Conference friends! From bottom-left, clock-wise: Francisco Marcano (BrightGauge, Miami, FL), William Lubelski and Lara Parvinsmith (EverTrue, Boston, MA), Jordan Maslyn (CO+LAB, Richmond, VA), Keith Perfetti (Def Method Inc., New York City, NY) and me, David Small (BrightGauge, Miami, FL) Takeaways At the end of it all after being sufficiently enlightened and intrigued by a few concepts, we definitely returned to Miami eager to make some changes to our BrightGauge development. On a technical level a small portion of our service is built using ReactJS taking advantage of ES6 goodness but the majority of the remaining, highly-interactive portions, use AngularJS and CoffeeScript. Having seen a few sessions on ES6 we’ll be looking into implementing it and moving away from CoffeeScript and ES5. We also want to evaluate and possibly revamp some of our asynchronous design patterns and look into improved server-side data compression. We also had no idea that the yarn package manager was a thing and worth considering as a replacement for npm - definitely worth looking into as well. We were happy to have spent the time in San Francisco taking in some great content from a sweet conference, exploring a beautiful city and making new friends. Take a look at a few of our other pics from the trip in our Facebook album!

Sometimes a dashboard just won’t do! Our customers spend a lot of time building out dashboards and customizing it to get the data they need exactly the way they want it. If you’re like me, I love using our dashboards for viewing my data because they are up around the office which makes it easy to see, plus they are updating in real time. However, every once in awhile I want to send a dashboard to someone who doesn’t have a log in or doesn’t want to have to log in. This happened recently with our Board of Directors when we set up a new dashboard for them to monitor how BrightGauge is doing. We noticed they might go a few days or even a week without logging in. Now we can take that dashboard and simply convert it from a dashboard to a report with 1 click of a button. This saves all the time of having to build a report from scratch! All you have to do is click the “More” drop down menu on a dashboard and you will see the option to “Convert to Report”. Here is a quick overview of the process to convert a dashboard to report in just seconds: This is a great example of a small yet very impactful feature that our awesome Product Team is constantly working on. If you have any other ideas for new features that you think will be a great fit, please email them to support@brightgauge.com and label it “Feature Request” in the title so it gets properly routed.

In roughly 10 years, Datto has grown from being one of many names in a sea of backup solution providers to one of the headlining names of the IT Services industry. We recently invited Datto’s VP of Business Development, Rob Rae, to join us for a conversation on achieving incredible growth in a commoditized industry. The insights Rob shared carried the conversation from brand messaging to customer education, partnering with the right solution providers, common themes in the ITSP industry, and more. Achieving Incredible Growth in a Commoditized Industry: Episode Highlights Rob’s introduction and background (0:48) How Datto has accomplished incredible growth in a short time, in a commoditized industry (6:31) Networking continuity and the acquisition of Open Mesh networking technologies (11:33) How is Datto’s messaging changing with the addition of cloud, appliances, and more? (14:14) The “sweet spot”, or typical solution provider partnering with Datto (18:18) When MSPs come to Datto, is it because they need to solve a problem for an end user, or because Datto is a brand focused on education? (23:01) Why ransomware solutions have been a significant win for Datto (24:29) How do MSPs make money with Datto? (27:48) Simple fixes for improving business: a common theme among the community (33:34) Datto’s trajectory and focus for the next 6-12-18 months (38:52) Q&A: Best business book, favorite personal improvement resource, parting advice for MSPs, how to reach Rob (42:41) Books as referenced by Rob: Anything by Malcolm Gladwell and also his Revisionist History podcast Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey Moore The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea by Bob Burg and John David Mann Resources referenced by Rob: ChannelE2E.com Want to find out more about The BrightGauge Podcast? Check out all the episodes here.

In case you missed it, we’ve made some major investments in our Customer Success Team over the past few months and I wanted to share why and how this team is here to serve you! Growing a Customer Success Team First of all, we have added a few new faces to our Customer Success Team to help handle the demand of our growing customer base. The team is now made up of 4 Customer Success Rockstars whose only mission in (work) life is to deliver “over-the-top” support to customers and ensure that we are exceeding all of your expectations. You will work with this team from the moment you sign up as they are responsible for Onboarding and Training. They are also responsible for any Data Customization needs you might have during your onboarding or any other time the need arises. Their fourth area of responsibility is Application Support making them your one stop shop for all your BrightGauge questions. What has Changed by Creating a New Team? We collapsed the Support, Data, Onboarding and Training teams all into one, which will be known as our Customer Success Team going forward. We realized that the line between Support and Data Customization was starting to blur and it was becoming too difficult to distinguish between the two. Additionally, when the Support Team was on a call and the customer needed some training, did we have to change teams? We realized the work and role they were playing might change but the person and their mission did not, so why make them separate teams? What Does a Customer Success Team Mean for You? It means a more integrated and simplified experience when working with our team. From the moment you sign up through the life of our partnership, you’ll be working with this team who is here to help and support you in any way we can. To learn how having a Customer Success Team can impact your growth check out our webinar: How Investing in Customer Success Drove our MSP Growth. Customer Success Starts with Onboarding Here’s a snapshot of the Onboarding Dashboard our team uses to monitor the progress of our customers getting started with us. The gauges listed above are: < 20 HS Divided by Total Subscriptions: We have a custom Health Score algorithm we use to monitor the health of our customers that ranks from 0 to 100. We keep track of the percentage of customers with a score of 20 and under to make sure we are monitoring our “unengaged customers”. Our goal is to keep that below 8%. Average Health Score: This takes the average across all of our customers of the Health Score I mentioned above. Our goal is to continually push that number up and this quarter we are targeting to get the number over 75. Stay tuned for updates on that. Churn TW: Number of customers that have canceled their account with us this week. (Six...ouch!) New Signups Not Connected: The most important first step for any new customer is to connect their data to our system. Therefore we keep a running list of the customers not connected. OnBoarding Tickets By Status: We have 5 stages in our Onboarding process and this pie chart helps us identify where the majority of the customers are. Not Connected: This is simply a Number Gauge of the “New Signups Not Connected” mentioned above. Count of Open Onboarding Tickets: The total number of Onboarding tickets our team is currently working on. Customer Success Includes Support Here’s a snapshot of the Support Dashboard our team uses to monitor the progress of our ongoing customer support. The gauges listed above are: Average Response Today: The team tracks their response time each day to ensure we’re getting back to our customers in a timely fashion. Average Resolution Today: We also track the total time it takes for us to complete each of our tickets to make sure we are closing tickets out quickly. Avg CSAT: This allows us to see the customer satisfaction for our given week. We aim to be 100%, but aren’t always perfect. Tickets Solved This Week Leaderboard: For a little healthy competition we track who’s closing the most tickets and it’s also a great way to see if someone is falling behind. Tickets By Type: This pie chart gives us a snapshot of the tickets currently open and what type of tickets they are. As we shared here, we recently updated our ticket types to give us better visibility into the trends of our requests. Customer Success is Held Accountable The team not only manages their regular KPIs via our Dashboards but also leverages our Scorecards to track unique KPIs that allow us to see trends over time. As you can see in the example above, Kristian (known to us as Client Call Connoisseur) tracks the number of Knowledge Base articles he updates. That’s an area he’s responsible for and each week he has to check in with the number of documents he has updated. Jessica, aka Flipper of Desks, is our main triage person and we expect her to close more than ⅔ of the tickets we receive. So we track her performance over time. And finally, Rick (aka Player of Games and Most Things Data) has a lot on his plate with Training Calls so we track how many he has each week and also check his other two main tasks of creating gauges for customers and solving tickets. How Can You Apply This in Your Business? Customer Success played a huge role in the growth of our MSP and continues to play a major role in our BrightGauge growth. If you’re not focused on Customer Success, you are missing out on an opportunity to turn up your growth. It’s important that all of your teams have a set of standard KPIs that you’re tracking and sharing in real time monitor their performance. Dashboards can easily identify when you are off track. Holding your team accountable via a scorecard allows everyone to see how they are performing over time and for you to identify trends that need to be addressed. To learn more about using a Customer Success Team to impact your growth check out our webinar: How Investing in Customer Success Drove our MSP Growth.

It doesn’t matter if your company is currently run out of your parent’s basement or if you’re a 500+ man operation. If you’re considering a help desk solution, you need to ensure it has these 11 features: What to look for in any help desk solution Canned Replies Most tickets you’ll receive will be about similar, if not identical, topics. Rather than typing out a response each time, you can reply with a copy and paste response. This will save your team valuable time and help to complete more tickets. Internal Notes This undervalued feature allows teams to keep information centralized. If done right, it gives team members the ability to pick up where others left off. This is a must-have feature due to its ability to provide team members with all the information they need. Tagging and Filtering Tagging is a small but powerful feature that provides you with more detailed data and keeps tickets organized. Most help desks contain tagging as a feature, but you will want to filter your tickets as well. Look for how easy it is to tag and filter, then understand how filtering is handled. This will seem small now, but during everyday use, the difference is significant. Automation Automation will be more important in the future, but even now the feature offers a huge opportunity to increase service team efficiency. With automation, you can perform tasks like assigning tickets automatically. For example, subjects containing the word “invoice” can be tagged as billing and assigned to your billing person. Mobile App If your help desk has a mobile app, it can be a lifesaver. A mobile app will allow you to handle critical tickets anywhere at any time. This will present much better service to your customers, and will pay off when they become loyal followers and brand advocates. A word of advice: make sure you get some hands-on time with their app during the trial period, as not all apps are created equal! Ticket Management and Tracking At its core, a help desk is a ticketing solution. So you'd be tempted to think that they're all excellent at tracking and managing tickets. Unfortunately, this isn’t always the case. Help desks can become so focused on the other features that they forget to improve ticket management! You’ll want to ensure that the help desk you choose presents tickets in an easily digestible way, shows enough details, and allows you to reassign and escalate tickets without hassle. Knowledge base Many help desks contain this feature, and with good reason. Knowledge bases help to reduce your ticket load and offer better service to customers. Just because a help desk offers a knowledge base, doesn’t mean you’re in the clear! You need to ensure that it’s easy to create and update articles, and that the knowledge base is easy for your customers to navigate. Customer History Keeping track of a customer’s past requests will help you both to identify trends, like who your problem customers are. You’ll also be able to identify repeated questions. User-Friendly Interface A user-friendly interface helps both your team and your customers. It can create a better experience for customers and increase your team's efficiency. A good help desk portal needs to be user-friendly for your customers, and shouldn’t need any training to use. On your end, it should be easy to view details, work with tickets, and be pleasant to spend a large amount of time in as your team will likely spend most of their time using the software! Easy to Implement with Good Documentation We touched on this above, but you should be able to implement your help desk within a month. (That means running at full capacity.) If it looks like it will take you longer than a month you shouldn’t be considering that help desk. Remember, you'll need to train your staff and your customers on using the new system. Your help desk should also have easy to follow documentation including how-to's, features, and troubleshooting. Stable App You don’t hear about this much, and it’s not a real feature, but we included it because it's so important. Without stability, your help desk can cause more problems than it fixes! Most help desks won’t crash outright, but there can be small bugs which affect performance. If you’re demoing a software, be on the lookout for these kinds of bugs. So tell us, which help desk features are most important to your business?