A few months ago, we explored the idea of doing quarterly business reviews (QBRs) for your managed service provider (MSP) business.
Regular check-ins with your own business goals and those of your clients ensures that you’re both still on the right track. Or if not, it gives you an opportunity to pause, reflect and course correct.
At this time of the year, you’ll see a lot of people talking about 2025 planning. I’ve just been doing it – for my own business and with my colleagues within TeamTubb. This is an essential task, and we’ll look at planning for the coming year in the next post.
But first, I strongly encourage you to look back at 2024. If you don’t do this exercise, I believe it will make your planning a lot harder. Look back at what went well and what wasn’t as good as you’d hoped. Be honest, and involve your team or department heads to help with the review.
What to Include in a Review of Your Year
There are all kinds of things you can include, and if you’ve been regularly doing QBRs, I’d suggest using the same things for your annual review too. But here are some ideas of what to look at:
Metrics: The main KPIs (key performance indicators) vary from business to business, but they could be things like:
- Client turnover/retention
- Service level agreements (SLAs) – are you hitting them? Missing them?
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Client lifetime value (CLV)
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- Audience size
- Company reputation
Clients: Ask your engineers or salespeople to help you with the answers to these questions:
- How have your client relationships been?
- Have you lost any/many this year?
- Have you been able to upsell or cross-sell any services to them?
- Have their businesses changed significantly?
- Have their needs changed? For instance, do they need more help with working from home, or with cybersecurity?
- Client satisfaction – ask them for feedback – are they happy with what you do for them? What could you improve? What could you do more of? Specifically, know your CSAT (customer satisfaction) score
Other Things to Include in Your Review
- Projects – were there any projects you wanted to work on this year? Did you start them? Did you finish them? Did you stick to the plan and the timeframe or was there scope creep?
- Collaborations – did you find any MSPs or business owners in adjacent fields to partner with?
- Current services – which are your most popular and most profitable? Are they the same (don’t assume they are!)
- New services – have you introduced new offerings to your existing clients? Or did you want to but didn’t manage it? Have you had the support you expected from vendor partners to make that happen?
- Cashflow/sales – are things going the way you expect them to?
And Look at:
- Marketing – how have your marketing efforts gone? Did you start any new approach this year? Can you dig into your Google Analytics or social media data to see how engaged your audience is? What about newsletter subscribers?
- Issues to be aware of
- Gaps in your/your team’s knowledge
- Tool stack/subscriptions – what are you paying for? Do you still need those tools? Is there a better solution?
- Learnings – did you have any CPD requirements to meet? New skills you wanted to acquire? Did you do them?
- Personal goals and objectives – as the business owner, your personal goals are inevitably linked to your plans for the company. Take time to review these, too. However, you may prefer to do this separately to the annual review
Don’t forget to have some fun with your yearly review, too! Don’t take it too seriously.
For the last few years, we’ve been doing a TeamTubb Christmas Takeover. Each of us chooses three pieces of content we really like. It might be something we created, or something that a colleague produced.
It’s a nice way to celebrate our accomplishments and also bring to light something we’ve forgotten about but performed really well at the time.
And remember, whether you surpassed your goals or fell short of them, December is a time for celebration!
Do you do an annual review and reflect back on the year you’ve just had? What do you include? Or if you don’t, have we inspired you to start now? Let us know in the comments!
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