As an MSP owner or manager, you want your teams to be continually improving and increasing efficiency. To make that happen, you know you need to be tracking MSP KPIs—after all, what gets measured gets improved. But which numbers do you track, how many do you track, and how do you actually use them to get better?
Auvik’s Patrick Aubert and Larry Garcia of BrightGauge hosted a great conversation worth sharing, about how to do just that: find the metrics that matter to you, turn them into achievable goals, and make it part of the team culture.
Don’t have time to watch the video? No problem! We’ve summarized the most important steps below.
Why create MSP KPIs?
If you’re not familiar, key performance indicators, or KPIs, are a collection of measurable activities or outcomes for your company or your staff, gathered together in a set that provide at-a-glace performance feedback. Whether it’s financial or operations, working with a set of KPIs has numerous benefits:
- Data doesn’t have a bias. The best way to be objective about how good or bad someone or something in the business is doing is to let the measurements do the talking (not your feelings).
- Seeing the results can motivate you to find new ways to succeed. Positive results usually create more positive results, helping to spark new ideas to continue an upward trend.
- Success is a great motivator. Nothing gets a team motivated to keep grinding more than seeing the fruits of their labor. Accentuate the positive, this isn’t punishment or pressure.
- KPIs drive accountability. Every team, and every person, should have goals to work towards. Those goals feed the metrics that make up the KPIs. It’s a great way to drill down and fix any problems you may not have been able to see before.
20 go-to metrics to consider
BrightGauge has put together a list of metrics that every small to medium service provider should consider tracking as part of their MSP KPIs. Broken out by team, you can mix and match to decide which metrics you want to track with which group in your company. Let’s take a look!
Service team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Tickets per endpoint | Which clients “create the most noise?” Helps to determine if your invoices match the work. |
| SLAs missed | Reviewing and remediating every missed SLA keeps problems from reoccurring. Helps generate an action plan. |
| Daily/weekly utilization rate | Hours spent, tickets closed, activities completed, etc. Pick one or several of these data points and strive to always improve them. |
| Issue backlog/current open tickets | Motivates the team to keep closing tickets. Drives customer satisfaction. |
| “Kill Rate” | How well the team is keeping up with tickets/issues, motivates to keep closing. |
| Tickets resolved today/yesterday | Great metric to see what gets done in a day, pushes teams to do better. Ensures nothing is falling through the cracks. |
| Billable/agreement hours | Are you spending time in the right places? Are all billable hours being accounted for? |
Sales team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Closed MRRs MTD/YTD | Keeps everyone motivated towards success, celebrates achievements. |
| Current sales pipeline | Everyone can see what’s coming up, ensuring the teams know where things are, so no deal goes stale. |
| Daily/weekly utilization rate | Hours spent, tickets closed, activities completed, etc. Pick one or several of these data points and strive to always improve them. |
| Sales activities | Live scorecard. Keeps sales motivated, accountable, and activities monitored. Keeps deals closing! |
Source: Unsplash
Project team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Billable project hours | Motivates the team to keep up project hours as defined in scope. Ensure no time goes by without set minimum billable work. |
| Over budget projects | Identifies budget overrun reasons allowing you to address them fast. Keep this data point as low as possible! |
Finance team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Cash in bank | Keeping an eye on the cash on hand for any SMB is critical! |
| Past due receivables amount | Customers need to pay on time, and you need to keep track. Motivate your finance team to collect before things go too far. Keeping the cash coming in is vital for any MSP. |
| Client Efficiency Index (CEI) | A way to quickly calculate your client’s gross margin—they aren’t costing you more to support than they are bringing in. Just remember: a high gross margin client can be a client ripe for poaching by a competitor offering less. |
| EBITDA | Earning before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. Always know this. Always keep this growing MoM. |
NOC/Operations team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Critical alerts/Issues opened | Know at a glance what the workload is. Never miss an issue. |
| Backups missed | A critical service you provide to your customers as an MSP. It’s a metric you want staying at zero. |
| Documentation Engagement | Ensure your team is spending time routinely on creating assets, editing existing documents, and reviewing. |
Bonus! Network engineering team
| Metric | What is it? |
|---|---|
| Interface utilization issues opened | This metric can be a sign of increased network needs (time to start planning), or ransomware! |
| Failed or missed configuration backups | Config backups are critical for reverting changes or recovering from hardware failure. Due dilligence is easier when you can see it tracked. |
How do you start building MSP KPIs?
This is the easy part, more or less. Once you’ve decided to start tracking, we’ve done a lot of the work for you. From the metrics above, decide on what you want to focus on first. Rule of thumb: stick to the block and tackle rule here. Don’t look for extremely technical or complicated metrics, but start out with things you know affect your bottom line, or motivate your team. Metrics you know you can gather easily, and interpret without much effort.
Beyond that, consider putting your measurements in a highly visible place. That could be screens hung around your office, with big displays of the figures anyone can see. If your workforce is distributed, think about a dashboard webpage anyone can access with the same results. Seeing things get accomplished will motive your team to keep making accomplishments. It’s a win/win.
Another question around MSP KPIs? Is there a metric you didn’t see and want to know about? Let us know in a comment and we’ll dig in!
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