Are you ready to kickstart your 2023 business planning?
Q4 is the perfect time to build your attack strategy for the new year. But knowing where to start 鈥� and where to focus your planning efforts 鈥� can be a daunting task. Do you know your priorities? Do you have a plan for your budget and future costs? Do you have enough staff to support your clients? And how can you truly know you鈥檙e ready?
Introducing our MSP鈥檚 2023 Planning Kit. This all-in-one download has 5 free tools that will make your new year鈥檚 planning thorough, intuitive, and effective. While you are welcome to simply open the tools and get to work, we wanted to make planning even easier for our MSPs this year. Use this guide to see the top 5 things we think MSPs should do to prep for 2023 鈥� and how to use our toolkit to achieve each one.
1) Gauge Your Current Readiness with the Assessment Tool
The first step to creating a 2023 business plan is taking stock of where you鈥檙e currently at. Understanding where your business鈥檚 weaknesses are will help you inform your plan鈥檚 focus for the new year. For this task, use our 2023 IT Readiness Assessment Tool.
The readiness assessment gives MSPs a clear picture of your IT resources, asset conditions, existing security measures, and more so you can plan accurately for the future. The tool considers four main areas of readiness (physical, software, cloud services, and security), and has you assign a number to each one, with 鈥�1鈥� being completely unprepared, and 鈥�5鈥� being entirely confident. Then, you鈥檒l get an overall breakdown to see where your lowest scores are. Those areas are the best places to begin focusing your planning efforts around.
2) Organize Your Priorities with the Priority Matrix Tool
Once you鈥檝e identified your readiness starting point, you can begin organizing all your priorities for you and your clients鈥� business in 2023 and establishing a loose timeline for completion. Our IT Priority Matrix tool allows you to weigh urgencies to determine which requests and tasks should take precedence in your ever-changing IT environment.
The IT Priority Matrix is designed to help you keep your workload manageable. Use it to review and assess your projects in an ever-changing IT environment. This is not a task management system, but a living document, changing each week or month as your priorities change.
With this tool, you can break down any task over 5 major pillars: potential impact on the business, time to completion, requestor position, resource expended, and cost budget / cost avoidance. You can then assign different priority weights to each pillar, with 1 being lowest priority and 3 being highest (say, for instance, that a task is only a 鈥�1鈥� on potential business impact, but it was requested by your highest-spending client, making the requestor position a 鈥�3鈥�). Then, the tool will automatically prioritize those tasks for you based on tackling the high business value components first.
3) Audit Your Current and Future Costs
When considering a budget for the new year, you must first audit both your current and projected future costs incurred by your equipment, your team, and your business as a whole. This measure of complete cost, called total cost of ownership (TCO) includes an item鈥檚 initial purchase price, any ongoing fees, maintenance, and even indirect costs (like long-term training and support). If it sounds like an overwhelming thing to calculate, our TCO Calculator is the perfect tool for you.
The tool allows you to compare 1-3 things (and these 鈥渢hings鈥� could truly be anything, from different tech stacks to employee numbers) based on their cost today, their future costs, and when they will equal out over time. You compare each component over 6 categories: infrastructure, hosting, software/apps, devices/hardware, personnel/support, and rollout costs.
Calculating TCO can help MSPs identify areas to improve workflow and decrease costs. It also provides an objective measurement of what鈥檚 a sound investment 鈥� and what鈥檚 not.
4) Assess Your Team Capacity
Many new year business plans have a similar goal of increasing revenue or attracting and retaining more clients. But first, you have to ensure that you have the right staff levels to support these growth goals. For example, if you plan to increase clients by 15% next year but your staff is already struggling with managing their current clients, you will need to plan to increase staffing along with an increase in clients. Our Help Desk Staffing Tool for MSPs will help you determine how growth of clients may require growth of your MSP team.
The tool enables you to generate a realistic view of your IT Support team staffing needs based on factors like ticket load and resolution time. You can determine actual billable hours, select a support task approach, and even alter your client numbers, and the calculator will provide a suggestion for the ideal amount of staff to handle the workload.
5) Update Your Budget
Once you鈥檝e identified your 2023 priorities, determined your business鈥檚 TCO, and assessed your team growth needs, you have all the information you need to create an updated budget for the new year. Our MSP鈥檚 Budgeting Template will reveal patterns that help set your organization’s financial outlook for the coming year.
The tool manages inflow, helps you determine a budget based on your projected clients, and lets you compare your year over year changes so you know exactly what you need to do, and what areas you鈥檒l need to invest financially in to make your business plan successful.
Once you鈥檝e used all these tools, you should be ready to handle anything 2023 will throw at you. But if you want to be sure, feel free to retake the IT Readiness Assessment to see how much your score has changed. The MSP鈥檚 2023 Planning Kit page also has additional resources, like Forrester鈥檚 Planning Guide, a mental health roadmap, and a guide to IT centralization for additional learning and context. Check out the site, and get started on your 2023 goals today.
New Year鈥檚 Planning is Easier with 探花大神
If any of your new years鈥� initiatives involve upgrading your clients鈥� tech stack and you鈥檙e not a current 探花大神 partner, there鈥檚 never been a better time to get onboard. Our newly released 探花大神 for MSPs offering enables our partners to securely and efficiently provide their customers with seamless access to resources that Make Work Happen.鈩� If you鈥檇 like to learn more, get in touch with us today, or skip right to the free trial.
