Hopefully, you can see the benefits of doing a regular business review. Put in your calendar, get the whole company involved, and feel more organised and able to hit your goals.
Whether you’ve decided to use the 3,2,1 methodology or not, here are some key elements to consider for your MSP business reviews.
1. Start Your Business Reviews with an Executive Summary
The executive summary is exactly as it sounds. Put it right at the top of the final report. You might find that you write this last, once your analysis is complete. But what should it include?
Pick three to five of the most important findings of your latest business review. Make sure you include successes as well as failures. Keep it short and to the point, and make it clear what the key takeaway is. This makes it easier for readers to identify the one core action to work on for the coming quarter.
2. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Regularly setting and reviewing your KPIs allows you to make the right decisions about projects, client work and the overall direction of the business. Your MSP’s KPIs will be different to your competitor’s, so don’t copy someone else’s!
However, the sorts of KPIs you should track include:
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Churn/turnover of clients
- Client lifetime value (CLV)
- Marketing results
- Services/solutions purchased
- Staff turnover
- Audience size/awareness of business
Whatever you choose to track, they should all be clearly measurable. And over time, you should be able to see how these have improved (or not). How you track is up to you. How you track is up to you. It can be done in a basic spreadsheet or in Google Sheets. Or if you’d like to be more techy, choose Google Analytics or build a KPI tracker dashboard.
3. Track Your Marketing Metrics
These can be included in your KPIs if you like. But if you’ve been focused on improving your marketing efforts, then review these separately, or at least in depth. But remember, the QBR isn’t the time to make drastic changes!
Things you might decide to look at here include:
- Click through rate
- Open rate
- Follower numbers
- Engagement rate
- How people find your website/specific pages
- Bounce rate
- Cost per lead
- Cost per conversion
- Keyword rankings
- Returning website visitors
Don’t forget that some of these are what marketers call ‘vanity metrics.’ A small audience who engages with your emails and posts regularly is much better than a huge following that never interacts.
Again, you can use a tool like Google Analytics to track performance over time. And it can generate reports to include in your QBR, too.
4. Identify Your Most Profitable Services in Your Business Reviews
You should be able to quickly identify which of your services or packages are the most valuable to your business. But knowing what kinds of companies are using them and in what volume (do they pay per licence or per seat?) will help.
Use this information to work out which you should focus on in the coming three or six months. Which services aren’t selling so well? Is this a surprise? And is it worth making a push to sell more, or is it time to retire those offerings?
5. Client Satisfaction and Feedback
As we’ve said in previous blogs, it’s important to do a regular check-in with your MSP clients. And it’s probably worth doing a longer meeting at the end of each quarter. You might cover things like licences, their business goals, and any challenges and legislative changes that might impact them.
But it’s also really important to do some kind of satisfaction survey with them. If you want your business to be successful and continue to grow, then you need to know what your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is. This metric is the most common way to do that evaluation and get a trustworthy result.
So how does it work? Well, it measures how ‘content’ a client is every time they have an interaction with your company. Then, they’re asked to rank their satisfaction with those interactions on a Likert Scale, which is out of 5 or 10. The results are then presented as a percentage.
Send a survey to all of your customers on a quarterly basis and their responses can be turned into numbers which are easier to interpret. But remember to use closed questions! If you want extra feedback, include a free-type box at the end.
6. Mention Your Goals in Business Reviews
It might sound obvious, but don’t forget to mention the business goals in your QBR! What have you decided are the three biggest targets you’re working towards this year? (These should have been agreed at the start of the year).
And are you on track to achieve them? What progress has been made since your last review? Have there been any issues? Does anything need to be tweaked or abandoned entirely? (do this with caution!) Make sure the whole company knows the goals and how they’re progressing.
7. Flag Potential Issues
Regular business reviews mean that you’re aware of where things aren’t going well. That might be internal, or it might be an issue with a customer or supplier. But whatever it is, once it’s been brought to your attention, you’ve got time to fix it.
Depending on what the problem is, you might need to have a meeting with key individuals. Or it might be a training requirement, which you should aim to fix before your next QBR. Make any necessary adjustments to your business goals and reallocate resources if need be.
8. State Next Steps at the End of Business Reviews
If you’ve chosen to use the ‘3,2,1 methodology’ we looked at last time, this will be your one core action, i.e.: “Create a timetable of practical actions to complete the removal and reinforcement of your services, systems, and solutions in a timely manner.”
Don’t forget, this action will be obvious if you’ve done the other two steps first – review what’s gone well and agree on two decisions for the business.
But regardless of how you’ve done your QBR, the next steps for the next three months should be obvious. You might choose to highlight these in your executive summary in your final report. It might be necessary to organise meetings with key stakeholders.
9. Future Planning
Your future plans should come towards the end of the QBR. For most businesses, this refers to how and when they’ll hit their goals. So they’ll have a one to two-year financial goal and review it regularly. Or they may be aiming for a target of X new employees or Y new customers.
But for managed services businesses, I’d say that future proofing is just as important. While most have been able to anticipate the rise in cyber attacks on SMBs, the sudden popularity of AI has caught some of them on the hop.
And as we know from the start of the pandemic in 2020, things can and do change dramatically and suddenly. So what can you do to ensure your business is still relevant in a few years’ time? Can you also anticipate the needs of your clients? And plan ahead to find solutions for them?
10. Include New Opportunities in Business Reviews
What are the new opportunities that have arisen for the business since your last QBR? This includes things like:
- New clients
- New services
- New markets
- Selling new services to existing clients
- Marketing opportunities
- Vendor/supplier relationships
- Funding pots
- Investors
Which should you focus on first? How will you measure success and profitability? And should you act on these opportunities now? Or should you park them and look at them again in future business reviews?
You Might Also be Interested in
- Why MSP Owners Should Schedule a Mid-Year Business Review
- How to use the ‘3, 2, 1 Quarterly Review’ Methodology for Better Business Planning
- How Technology Business Reviews can Improve Your MSP Client Relationships
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