4. Pricing Your Services
So, you’ve decided you’re going to launch your MSP - this is great news of course, but now you need to begin to consider how you will price your services.
In the world of break-fix, this was a fairly straightforward proposition, you just pick an hourly rate for your services and charge accordingly. In a fixed fee environment it’s a little harder.
Per User, Per Device, Per Anything?
This is a big decision to make. A lot of MSPs now charge on a per user basis and to be honest it’s my preferred approach. Pricing per device can get complicated when services move to the cloud and end users generally know how many staff they have so it’s an easy calculation. A lot of the other services you will purchase for the support of the client will no doubt be per user. So, if you want my opinion, that’s what I would do - but it’s totally your choice of course.
Bundle?
Another decision that will need to be made is around bundling and if you want to do it or not. In my experience most MSPs bundle some products into their standard offering and some offer them on a good, better, best style matrix.
For example :
A Precious Metal | A Slightly More Precious Metal | A very expensive Metal |
Service Desk Support (9-5) | Service Desk Support (9-5) | Service Desk Support (24/7) |
On Site Escalation | On Site Escalation | On Site Escalation |
| | Managed Antivirus | Managed Antivirus |
| | Email Content Filtering | Email Content Filtering |
| | | Web Content Filtering |
| | | Quarterly Review Meeting |
$ | $$ | $$$ |
They are usually named in such a way, but there is no reason to, so be creative. The basic idea is to show that they get better the further up the scale.
Once you have your package(s) in place it’s a matter of adding up the costs of all the items and then this will become the core cost of delivering the service.
Do Your Research
When you have your cost it’s time to consider how much you will charge. At this point it’s time to look at the competition. Lots of MSPs don’t externally publish their prices so it’s not always easy to get an idea, but it’s worth looking around to see what you can find. There are also some great MSP research papers that show pricing in different countries.
So, once you have your pricing model in place it’s time to talk about your clients. How do you find new clients and how can you get existing clients onto the new MSP packages.
Cheers,
Chris
