How much does it cost to hire an Autotask Certified Guide?
Key takeaways:
A common theme to the “help me” messages…
How much time to fully leverage Autotask?
The burning question: how much $ to master Autotask?
There are real risks. Know what they are.
Cost to hire an Autotask expert: the final answer.
I‘ve been working in Autotask for a long time. And I’ve been helping MSPs win with Autotask for a pretty long time, too.
Readers of this column have successfully implemented the recommendations in my articles and know they can always reach out for help with a fully managed (pun intended) implementation.
Many of the “help me” calls and emails start out with a consistent theme: “How much is this going to cost me, and is it going to take a lot of time?”
Just asking about time and money doesn’t provide the complete answer. For that, they need to get curious and lean in a bit more into the conversation. They also need to ask about the return on investment (ROI).
Today I thought we’d satisfy some of that curiosity and dive into what you get for those dollars (US, AUD, CAD, NZD) and pounds.
TLDR - The answer is 15-25% of the return on the investment.
Now let’s fully unpack this.
There are two ways to answer this question:
1) The cost of not engaging a guide in Time, $$$, and Risk.
2) The out-of-pocket expense of hiring a guide.
Time:
For me personally, it took 7 years to figure out how to fully leverage the Autotask software, working 20-40 hours per week focused on the topic. We have heard from several other MSPs who spent just as long, if not longer. In today’s busy, modern MSP world, who has 20-40 hours available just to work on the question, “How do you fully leverage the Autotask software”?
Most Autotask Certified Consultant Partners (ACCP) can guide an MSP thru the improvement process in a few months (if you can find one - at one time, there were only 18 Autotask CCPs – not sure how many are still guiding MSPs today).
How many months depends on what the goals are. For example:
1) Techs knowing what to work on next – 6-8 weeks
2) Streamlining the Invoicing process – 4-6 weeks
3) Improving the Client Experience – 6-8 weeks
4) Service Manager or Project Manager training – 3 months
And the list goes on and on. But there is great hope: achieving full-Service Delivery Optimization can be accomplished in less than a year with a guide – saving your team at least 6 trial and error years figuring it out.
$$$
When it comes to Dollars, Euros, Pounds, etc., we are comparing lost opportunity costs to out-of-pocket expenses. Once again, it depends on what we are trying to improve:
1) Techs not knowing what to work on next is the biggest reason for the less than 50% utilization that Fred V spoke about at DattoCon. So, if your Techs are the norm, 30% of their billable hours are being wasted, and a lost opportunity cost of around $31,200 per Tech per Year.
Not having a Streamlined Invoicing process is costing MSPs about 15% of MRR by not capturing non-MSA work. Work like Projects, Afterhours, and in some agreements, Travel and Onsite work. While this work is excluded 1) from the MSP agreements unless the Invoicing process is streamlined, most of it is missed and being written off as Managed Service Support.
2) Improving the Client Experience, empowering Service Managers to do their job, and completing projects on Time and on Budget are much harder numbers to get to, but in general, the opportunity costs are still in the range of 4 to 6 times more than the cost of fixing the problem.
Risk:
Without engaging someone who has been there and done that, the risks are quite high. We have seen more than one Service Manager terminated because they could not improve the KPIs that impact the bottom line.
We have already discussed the Risk of taking 6 years longer than necessary and losing out on $186,000 per Tech in revenue growth. What about the MSPs that have been at it for 10 years and still have not arrived? Or the MSP I went to work for somewhere between their 25th & 30th year of being an MSP?
Summary:
These are just some of the costs of not improving your Service Delivery Operational performance.
Now that we understand the value of an Autotask Certified Consulting Partner (ACCP), we can refine the original questions down to what really matters to the busy MSP Owner or Service Manager:
What is the price to engage an Autotask Certified Consultant Partner (CCP)?
That depends. Autotask is a very complicated, robust software. There is a lot that you can do with it. You need to ask:
What do you need to do immediately?
If you had a magic wand, what would you want to accomplish by a year from now?
The answers to these questions set the price, but it generally costs about $3,000 per month to engage a Certified Autotask Guide.
How many months will it take? Well, to answer that question, Advanced Global offers a Free, No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation to help you figure that out. And, more importantly, to inform you on what you do not know about the opportunities available in a fully leveraged Autotask PSAutomation tool.
Are you ready for the next step – to know what you do not know about leveraging Autotask? Schedule a Call, and we will get you on the road to finding out.
The elephant in the room:
Who is Advanced Global, and why should we listen to them?
Recently someone we’ve been in communication with since DattoCon 2018, who was faithfully reading our articles, commented that up until a few months ago, “I really did not know what Advanced Global does.” So here are a few bullet points to let anyone interested know who we are and what we do:
1) We Are – the Autotask Global Service Delivery Authority
2) We Help – MSPs thrive
3) We Solve – Service Delivery issues, inefficiencies, and challenges by making sure:
a. Techs know what to work on next
b. Someone is managing all open tickets and driving them to completion
c. The staffing levels are correct, and the workload is balanced
d. Real-Time Time Entry is a cultural habit
e. The Client has a great client experience
f. Profit is maximized
g. Autotask is being fully leveraged
h. The historical data that is in the Autotask software is accessible to benchmark, track & USE effectively
i. The Service Delivery operations can scale
j. Projects are completed On-Time and On-Budget
k. The Company can grow
l. MSPs know what they don’t know
4) Our Tools:
a. Autotask “Best in Class” standard build
b. Our MSP robust Service Delivery SOP library
c. Advanced Live Reports
d. Expertise in providing a transformational experience
Note: We are not philosophers; we are doers with 31+ years of Service Delivery experience, bringing real Service Delivery Improvement change, profitability, and Best in Class performance.
We start by offering a FREE No-Obligation PSA Configuration Evaluation.
