As the owner of a managed service provider (MSP) business, you’re likely aware of the fact that you need to be growing your business in order to survive and thrive. But the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), increased competition and the fact that small businesses are going directly to vendors for their IT needs could be hampering your plans for growth. You may be wishing you could just get a little help setting your business up for your future success, but running your business day to day gets in the way of planning for the future. We know, it’s enough to make you want to pull your hair out sometimes. The good news? You can get help, on your own time, and for free if you’re a Pax8 partner! Read on to learn more about why it’s so crucial to keep growing your business and how we can help with Pax8 Guided Growth.
Three Problems Facing Modern MSPs
In addition to the usual challenges you may face as a small business owner, the MSP business has another set of challenges standing in the way of your future success.
Increased Competition
The MSP market just keeps getting more competitive. A recent survey showed 98% of MSPs expect revenue to increase in 2025, and 96% of respondents anticipated profit growth. While that’s good news for everyone in the MSP business, it does bring up questions: What does my business offer that others don’t? How can I set myself apart from the pack? And if you’re a smaller MSP still charting the path to growth, these questions are all the more pressing in light of competition from the bigger guys.
Small Businesses Are Going Direct to Vendors
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are becoming more tech-savvy and often prefer to go directly to vendors for their IT needs, particularly companies with fewer than 100 employees. Despite this fact, there’s light at the end of the tunnel: A survey showed 63% of SMBs prefer using fewer vendors to meet their technology requirements, meaning you can be that one-stop shop for your clients, with help from Pax8.
The Rise of AI
While AI is making our lives easier in some ways, it brings both opportunities and threats to MSPs. For instance, AI has the power to enhance productivity, service delivery and operational efficiency, as MSP owners estimate 39% of their staff’s time is spent on manual tasks, but it also raises concerns about security and governance, with data breaches growing by 72% in 2023 compared to 2021. Smaller MSPs need to adapt to these changes by leveraging AI to their advantage and enabling AI for their clients — without significantly increasing the threat of security breaches for either party.
Three Steps to Build Your MSP Business
It’s clear that growing MSPs need to find ways to meet these challenges so they can stay on that yellow brick road to business growth. Let’s break down what you can do into three key steps.
Undergo Training
You’ll need to invest in education and continuous training to stay up to date with the latest technologies and industry best practices. Educational programs can help you and your team acquire the skills needed to improve MSP and client cybersecurity, move clients to the cloud and securely enable AI, among other areas of growth.
Leverage Sales Enablement
Once you and your team are upleveled with the skills needed for new lines of business, it’s time to go to market. Part of preparing for this involves coming up with compelling value propositions for your organization, refining your sales pitch and marketing materials, and leveraging lead-generation strategies.
Increase Your Tech Stack
With the know-how and enablement in place, it’s time to expand your tech stack. This involves both upgrading the technology you use internally, such as professional services automation (PSA) and remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools to better manage clients, and expanding the range of services you offer, such as a more robust cybersecurity portfolio, AI enablement, cloud infrastructure and the full Microsoft stack.
Putting It All into Practice: Following Pax8 Guided Growth
We know, stepping up your education and enablement game and increasing your tech stack is all a lot easier said than done. That’s why we built Pax8 Guided Growth! (Sorry, we get a little excited about MSP growth.)
Pax8 Guided Growth is designed to help MSPs navigate their growth journey with step-by-step guidance and practical support. It’s built around three core pillars: Equip, Optimize and Grow.
Equip
The Equip phase focuses on providing partners with the necessary tools and resources to get started. This includes a readiness assessment to identify your current capabilities and virtual learning to build foundational knowledge on your own time.
Optimize
In the Optimize phase, the focus shifts to personalizing your growth journey. Based on the assessment results, Pax8 helps you tailor your strategy to meet your specific goals. This phase includes role-based learning paths and solution recommendations.
Grow
The Grow phase is all about implementation and market expansion. Pax8 provides the support needed to take your business to the next level, including go-to-market strategies, sales enablement and ongoing performance monitoring.
Why Follow Pax8 Guided Growth?
We’re glad you asked! There are a lot of reasons you should consider Pax8 as your partners in growth, aside from that we’re fun, cool people.
We’re a Marketplace Leader
Our Marketplace makes it really easy for MSPs to procure, manage and deploy the solutions their clients might be looking for, from security to AI, so they don’t sidestep the MSP process altogether.
We Help You Make It Happen on Your Own, in Your Own Time
Our targeted education and enablement resources are here to help you learn only what you need, when you need it. There’s no cost to take part in the program, either; you just need to be a Pax8 partner transacting on the Marketplace, and you can get started now!
We Offer Best-in-Class Vendors
It’s not rocket science — our Marketplace is great because of the vendors we have and we’re always adding more. This ensures you and your clients have access to the latest solutions in cybersecurity, AI and more.
Take Your First Step on the Path to Guided Growth
We know it can be a lot to try to get ahead in a field as crowded as ours is. It’s tempting to just keep on doing what you’re doing and hope for the best. But everyone knows, the changing landscape around security and AI alone are making it much more difficult to do the same thing, year after year.
The most important thing you can do is take that first step toward building a more modern business. Pax8 Guided Growth helps you do just that by getting started with free, on-demand educational courses before continuing with the expert guidance you need to establish your business goals and achieve them. Check out Pax8 Guided Growth to start the conversation.
