Managing Technicians In An MSP Business For Profitability - Part 3

When running a managed service provider (MSP) business, the single largest part of the overall costs of doing business is the technicians that support your end customer – from straight salary and benefits, to training, transportation and managing the collection of their time, through to billing the customer. In this series of whitepapers, Karl Palachuk goes through the elements that you need to take into account to best manage your technicians’ time. This includes everything from how to structure their day and their priorities, to tracking their efforts to ensure that your business is being run in the most productive manner – ultimately driving the most profitability.

Technician Time Management

This procedure covers the standard “routine” for a technician. Before you get into any details, please note one critically important thing:

• The point of all of this process is to... avoid being interrupt driven.

By “interrupt driven”, I simply mean that you allow yourself to be interrupted and therefore end up doing whatever interrupted you most recently. It’s a simple phrase yet a very difficult concept to implement. Just like exercise, if you get out of the habit of non-interruption for a few days, it can take some work to get back on track.

We allow ourselves to be interrupted by the telephone. How often is the telephone call more important than what you were doing? Two percent of the time?